The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: ՀայոցՑեղասպանություն, translit.:Hayoc’ C’eġaspanowt’yown; Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı) – also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Calamity (Մեծ Եղեռն, Meç Eġeṙn, Armenian pronunciation: [mɛts jɛˈʁɛrn]) – was the deliberate and systematic destruction (genocide) of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I.[1] It was characterized by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between one and 1.5 million.[2][3][4][5] Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Greeks, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.[6][7][8]

It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,[9][10][11] as scholars point to the systematic, organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians.[12] Indeed, the word genocide[13] was coined in order to describe these events.[14] It is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.[15]

The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace.

Prelude

Life under Ottoman rule

The majority of the Armenian population was concentrated in the east of the Ottoman Empire.

In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Muslim dhimmi system, Armenians, as Christians, were guaranteed limited freedoms (such as the right to worship), but were in essence treated as second-class citizens. Christians and Jews were not considered equals to Muslims: testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses, their houses could not overlook those of Muslims, and their religious practices would have to defer to those of Muslims, in addition to various other legal limitations.[21] Violation of these statutes could result in punishments ranging from the levying of fines to execution.

The three major European powers, Great Britain, France and Russia (known as the Great Powers), took issue with the Empire's treatment of its Christian minorities and increasingly pressured the Ottoman government (also known as the Sublime Porte) to extend equal rights to all its citizens. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government implemented the Tanzimat reforms to improve the situation of minorities, although these would all prove largely ineffective. By the late 1870s, the Greeks, along with several countries of the Balkans, frustrated with their conditions, had, often with the help of the Powers, broken free of Ottoman rule. Armenians, for the most part, remained passive during these years, earning them the title of millet-i sadıka or the "loyal millet."[22]

Reform implementation, 1860s–1880s

In the mid-1860s to early 1870s, Armenians began to ask for better treatment from the Ottoman government. After amassing the signatures of peasants from Western Armenia (where the bulk of the Armenian population in the empire was concentrated), the Armenian Communal Council had petitioned to the Ottoman government to redress the issues that the peasants complained about: "the looting and murder in Armenian towns by [Muslim] Kurds and Circassians, improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as witnesses in trial."[23] The Ottoman government considered these grievances and promised to punish those responsible.[23]

Following the violent suppression of Christians in the uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Serbia in 1875, the Great Powers invoked the 1856 Treaty of Paris by claiming that it gave them the right to intervene and protect the Ottoman Empire's Christian minorities.[24] Under growing pressure, the government declared itself a constitutional monarchy (which was almost immediately dissolved) and entered into negotiations with the powers. At the same time, the Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople headed by Nerses II, forwarded Armenian complaints of widespread "forced land seizure ... forced conversion of women and children, arson, protection extortion, rape, and murder" to the Powers.[25]

After the conclusion of the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War, Armenians began to look more towards Russia as the ultimate guarantors of their security. Nerses approached the Russian leadership during its negotiations with the Ottomans in San Stefano and in the eponymous treaty, convinced them to insert a clause, Article 16, that stipulated that Russian forces occupying the Armenian provinces would only withdraw with the full implementation of Ottoman reforms.[26] Great Britain was troubled with Russia holding on to so much Ottoman territory and forced it to enter into new negotiations with the convening of the Congress of Berlin on June 13, 1878. Armenians also entered into these negotiations and emphasized that they sought autonomy, not independence from the Ottoman Empire.[27] They partially succeeded as Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin contained the same text as Article 16 but removed any mention that Russian forces would remain in the provinces; instead, the Ottoman government was to periodically inform the Great Powers of the progress of the reforms.

Hamidian Massacres, 1894–1896

In 1876, the Ottoman government was led by SultanAbdul Hamid II. From the beginning of the reform period after the signing of the Berlin treaty, Hamid II attempted to stall their implementation and asserted that Armenians did not make up a majority in the provinces and that Armenian reports of abuses were largely exaggerated or false. In 1890, Hamid II created a paramilitary outfit known as the Hamidiye which was made up of Kurdish irregulars who were tasked to "deal with the Armenians as they wished."[28] As Ottoman officials intentionally provoked rebellions (often as a result of over-taxation) in Armenian populated towns, such as in Sasun in 1894 and Zeitun in 1895-1896, these regiments were increasingly used to deal with the Armenians by way of oppression and massacre. In some instances, Armenians successfully fought off the regiments and brought the excesses to the attention of the Great Powers in 1895 who subsequently condemned the Porte.[29]

The Powers forced Hamid to sign a new reform package designed to curtail the powers of the Hamidiye in October 1895 which like the Berlin treaty, was never implemented. On October 1, 1895, 2,000 Armenians assembled in Constantinople to petition for the implementation of the reforms but Ottoman police units converged towards the rally and violently broke it up.[30] Soon, massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian-populated provinces of Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzerum, Harput, Sivas, Trabzon and Van. Estimates differ on how many Armenians were killed but European documentation of the violence, which became known as the Hamidian massacres, placed the figures from anywhere between 100,000–300,000 Armenians.[31]

Although Hamid was never directly implicated for ordering the massacres, he was suspected for their tacit approval and for not acting to end them.[32] Frustrated with European indifference to the massacres, Armenians from the Dashnaktsutiun political party seized the European-managed Ottoman Bank on August 26, 1896. This incident brought further sympathy for Armenians in Europe and was lauded by the European and American press, which vilified Hamid and painted him as the "great assassin" and "bloody Sultan."[33] While the Great Powers vowed to take action and enforce new reforms, these never came into fruition due to conflicting political and economic interests.

On July 24, 1908, Armenians' hopes for equality in the empire brightened once more when a coup d'état staged by officers in the Turkish Third Army based in Salonika removed Hamid II from power and restored the country back to a constitutional monarchy. The officers were part of the Young Turk movement that wanted to reform administration of the decadent state of the Ottoman Empire and modernize it to European standards. The movement was an anti-Hamidian coalition made up of two distinct groups: the secularliberalconstitutionalists and the nationalists; the former was more democratic and accepted Armenians into their wing whereas the latter was more intolerant in regard to Armenian-related issues and their frequent requests for European assistance.[34] In 1902, during a congress of the Young Turks held in Paris, the heads of the liberal wing, Sabahheddin Bey and Ahmed Riza, partially persuaded the nationalists to include in their objectives to ensure some rights to all the minorities of the empire.

Among the numerous factions of the Young Turks also included the political organization Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Originally a secret society made up of army officers based in Salonika, the CUP proliferated amongst military circles as more army mutinies took place throughout the empire. In 1908, elements of the Third Army and the Second Army Corps declared their opposition to the Sultan and threatened to march on the capital to depose him. Hamid, shaken by the wave of resentment, stepped down from power as Armenians, Greeks, Arabs, Bulgarians and Turks alike rejoiced in his dethronement.[35]

Adana Massacre, 1909

An Armenian town left pillaged and destroyed after the massacres in Adana in 1909.

A countercoup took place on April 13, 1909. Some Ottoman military elements, joined by Islamictheological students, aimed to return control of the country to the Sultan and the rule of Islamic law. Riots and fighting broke out between the reactionary forces and CUP forces, until the CUP was able to put down the uprising and court-martial the opposition leaders.

While the movement initially targeted the nascent Young Turk government, it spilled over into pogroms against Armenians who were perceived as having supported the restoration of the constitution.[36] When Ottoman Army troops were called in, many accounts record that instead of trying to quell the violence they actually took part in pillaging Armenian enclaves in Adana province.[37] 15,000–30,000 Armenians were killed in the course of the "Adana Massacre".[38][39]

Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 period

Labor battalions, February 25

Minister of War Enver Pasha developed a plan to encircle and destroy the Russian Caucasus Army at Sarıkamış, to regain territories lost to Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Enver Pasha's forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and almost completely destroyed. Returning to Constantinople, Enver publicly blamed his defeat on Armenians living in the region actively siding with the Russians.[40]

On February 25, 1915, The War minister Enver Pasha sent an order to all military units that Armenians in the active Ottoman forces be demobilized and assigned to the unarmed Labour battalion (Turkish: amele taburlari). Enver Pasha explained this decision as "out of fear that they would collaborate with the Russians". As a tradition, the Ottoman Army drafted non-Muslim males only between the ages of 20 and 45 into the regular army. The younger (15–20) and older (45–60) non-Muslim soldiers had always been used as logistical support through the labor battalions. Before February, some of the Armenian recruits were utilized as laborers (hamals), though they would ultimately be executed.[41]

Transferring Armenian conscripts from active field (armed) to passive, unarmed logistic section was an important aspect of the subsequent genocide. As reported in "The Memoirs of Naim Bey", the extermination of the Armenians in these battalions was part of a premeditated strategy on behalf of the Committee of Union and Progress. Many of these Armenian recruits were executed by local Turkish gangs.[42]

Events at Van, April 1915

Armed Armenian civilians and self-defense units holding a line against Turkish forces in the walled Van Resistance in May 1915.

On April 19, 1915, Jevdet Bey demanded that the city of Van immediately furnish him 4,000 soldiers under the pretext of conscription. However, it was clear to the Armenian population that his goal was to massacre the able-bodied men of Van so that there would be no defenders.[43] Jevdet Bey had already used his official writ in nearby villages, ostensibly to search for arms, which had turned into wholesale massacres.[43] The Armenians offered five hundred soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest in order to buy time, however, Djevdet accused Armenians of "rebellion," and spoke of his determination to "crush" it at any cost. "If the rebels fire a single shot," he declared, "I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and" (pointing to his knee) "every child, up to here."[44]

On April 20, 1915, the armed conflict of the Van Resistance began when an Armenian woman was harassed, and the two Armenian men that came to her aid were killed by Turkish soldiers. The Armenian defenders protected 30,000 residents and 15,000 refugees in an area of roughly one square kilometer of the Armenian Quarter and suburb of Aigestan with 1,500 able bodied riflemen who were supplied with 300 rifles and 1,000 pistols and antique weapons. The conflict lasted until General Yudenich came to rescue them.[45]

Similar reports reached Morgenthau from Aleppo and Van, prompting him to raise the issue in person with Talaat and Enver. As he quoted to them the testimonies of his consulate officials, they justified the deportations as necessary to the conduct of the war, suggesting that complicity of the Armenians of Van with the Russian forces that had taken the city justified the persecution of all ethnic Armenians.

Arrest and deportation of Armenian notables, April 1915

Armenian intellectuals who were arrested and later executed en masse by Ottoman authorities on the night of April 24, 1915.

On April 24, 1915, the Red Sunday (Armenian: Կարմիր Կիրակի), was the night which the leaders of Armenians of the Ottoman capital, Constantinopole, and later extending to other Ottoman centers were arrested and moved to two holding centers near Ankara by then minister of interior Mehmed Talat Bey with his order on April 24, 1915. These Armenians later deported with the passage of Tehcir Law on 29 May 1915. The date 24 April, Genocide Remembrance Day, commemorates the Armenian notables deported from the Ottoman capital in 1915, as the precursor to the ensuing events.

In his order, order on April 24, 1915, Talat claimed "have long been pursuing to gain an administrative autonomy and this desire is displayed once more, in no uncertain terms, with the inclusion of the Russian Armenians who have assumed a position against us together with the Daschnak Committee in no time in the regions of Zeytûn (Zeitun Resistance (1915)), Bitlis, Sivas, and Van (Van Resistance) in accordance with the decisions they have previously taken (Armenian congress at Erzurum)." By 1914, Ottoman authorities had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a threat to the empire's security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Constantinople. [It included such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Committee of Union and Progress leaders and will succeed in opening the straits (of the Dardanelles)."[46]

Massacres

Mass Burnings

Eitan Belkind was a Nili member, who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Camal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the burning of 5,000 Armenians.[48]

Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, describes how a population of a village were taken all together, and then burned.[49] The Commander of the Third Army Vehib's 12-page affidavit, which was dated 5 December 1918, was presented in the Trabzon trial series (March 29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment,[50] reporting such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Mush.[51] that in Bitlis, Mus and Sassoun, "The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in the various camps was to burn them." And also that, "Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at the remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after."

Suffocation

Trabzon was the main city in Trabzon province; Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trabzon, reports: "This plan did not suit Nail Bey.... Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard."[52] The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: "I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea."[53] The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drowned in the Black Sea.[54]

Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé d'affaires, writes: "Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing."[55]

Use of poison/overdose

This iconic photo, taken by the German medic Armin Wegner, shows Armenian refugees marching across the Syrian desert.

The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton writes in a parenthesis when introducing the crimes of Nazi doctors, "Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest." [56]

Morphine overdose; During the Trabzon trial series of the Martial court, from the sittings between March 26 and May 17, 1919, the Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib caused the death of children with the injection of morphine. The information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib's colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed.[57][58]

Toxic gas; Dr. Ziya Fuad and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits reporting cases in which two school buildings were used to organize children and send them to the mezzanine to kill them with toxic gas equipment.[59][60]

Typhoid inoculation; The Ottoman surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote "on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the IIIrd Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzican were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood ‘inactive’."[61][62] Jeremy Hugh Baron writes: "Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim's brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938."[63]

In May 1915, Mehmed Talat Pasha requested that the cabinet and Grand VizierSaid Halim Pasha legalize a measure for relocation and settlement of Armenians to other places due to what Talat Pasha called "the Armenian riots and massacres, which had arisen in a number of places in the country." However, Talat Pasha was referring specifically to events in Van and extending the implementation to the regions in which alleged "riots and massacres" would affect the security of the war zone of the Caucasus Campaign. Later, the scope of the immigration was widened in order to include the Armenians in the other provinces.

On 29 May 1915, the CUP Central Committee passed the Temporary Law of Deportation ("Tehcir Law"), giving the Ottoman government and military authorization to deport anyone it "sensed" as a threat to national security.[65] The "Tehcir Law" brought some measures regarding the property of the deportees, but during September a new law was proposed. By means of the "Abandoned Properties" Law (Law Concerning Property, Dept's and Assets Left Behind Deported Persons, also referred as the "Temporary Law on Expropriation and Confiscation"), the Ottoman government took possession of all "abandoned" Armenian goods and properties. Ottoman parliamentary representative Ahmed Riza protested this legislation:

It is unlawful to designate the Armenian assets as “abandoned goods” for the Armenians, the proprietors, did not abandon their properties voluntarily; they were forcibly, compulsorily removed from their domiciles and exiled. Now the government through its efforts is selling their goods... If we are a constitutional regime functioning in accordance with constitutional law we can’t do this. This is atrocious. Grab my arm, eject me from my village, then sell my goods and properties, such a thing can never be permissible. Neither the conscience of the Ottomans nor the law can allow it.[66]

On 13 September 1915, the Ottoman parliament passed the "Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation", stating that all property, including land, livestock, and homes belonging to Armenians, was to be confiscated by the authorities.[67]

With the implementation of Tehcir law, the confiscation of Armenian property and the slaughter of Armenians that ensued upon the law's enactment outraged much of the western world. While the Ottoman Empire's wartime allies offered little protest, a wealth of German and Austrian historical documents has since come to attest to the witnesses' horror at the killings and mass starvation of Armenians.[68][69][70] In the United States, The New York Times reported almost daily on the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the process as "systematic", "authorized" and "organized by the government." Theodore Roosevelt would later characterize this as "the greatest crime of the war."[71]

Death Marches

An Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field "within sight of help and safety at Aleppo."

The Armenians were marched out to the Syrian town of Deir ez-Zor and the surrounding desert. A good deal of evidence suggests that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities or supplies to sustain the Armenians during their deportation, nor when they arrived.[72] By August 1915, The New York Times repeated an unattributed report that "the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people."[73]

Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves.[72] Deprived of their belongings and marched into the desert, hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished.

Naturally, the death rate from starvation and sickness is very high and is increased by the brutal treatment of the authorities, whose bearing toward the exiles as they are being driven back and forth over the desert is not unlike that of slave drivers. With few exceptions no shelter of any kind is provided and the people coming from a cold climate are left under the scorching desert sun without food and water. Temporary relief can only be obtained by the few able to pay officials.[72]

German engineers and laborers involved in building the railway also witnessed Armenians being crammed into cattle cars and shipped along the railroad line. Franz Gunther, a representative for Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad Railway, forwarded photographs to his directors and expressed his frustration at having to remain silent amid such "bestial cruelty".[75] Major General Otto von Lossow, acting military attaché and head of the German Military Plenipotentiary in the Ottoman Empire, spoke to Ottoman intentions in a conference held in Batum in 1918:

The Turks have embarked upon the "total extermination of the Armenians in Transcaucasia... The aim of Turkish policy is, as I have reiterated, the taking of possession of Armenian districts and the extermination of the Armenians. Talaat's government wants to destroy all Armenians, not just in Turkey but also outside Turkey. On the basis of all the reports and news coming to me here in Tiflis there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they left alive until now.[76]

Extermination Camps

The Armenians were driven south toward the deserts of Syria, with only what they could carry.

It is believed that 25 major concentration camps existed, under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hand-men of Talat Pasha.[77] The majority of the camps were situated near Turkey's modern Iraqi and Syrian borders, and some were only temporary transit camps.[77] Others, such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz, are said to have been used only temporarily, for mass graves; these sites were vacated by autumn 1915.[77] Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days.[77]

On the Middle Eastern front, the British military engaged Ottoman forces in southern Syria and Mesopotamia. British diplomat Gertrude Bell filed the following report after hearing the account of a captured Ottoman soldier:

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras al-Ain in twelve hours... some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guardianship of some hundred Kurds... These Kurds were called gendarmes, but in reality mere butchers; bands of them were publicly ordered to take parties of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women... One of these gendarmes confessed to killing 100 Armenian men himself... the empty desert cisterns and caves were also filled with corpses...[78]

Teşkilat-i Mahsusa

The Committee of Union and Progress founded a "special organization" (Turkish: Teşkilat-i Mahsusa) that participated in the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.[79] This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a special forces outfit, or the later Einsatzgruppen.[80] Later in 1914, the Ottoman government influenced the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization.[81] According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees.[82]Vehib Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Third Army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human species.”[80]

Trials

Turkish courts-martial

In 1919, Sultan Mehmed VI ordered domestic courts-martial to try members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (Turkish: "Ittihat Terakki") for their role in taking the Ottoman Empire into World War I. The courts-martial blamed the members of CUP for pursuing a war that did not fit into the notion of Millet. The Armenian issue was used as a tool to punish the leaders of the CUP. Most of the documents generated in these courts were later moved to international trials. By January 1919, a report to Sultan Mehmed VI accused over 130 suspects, most of whom were high officials. The military court found that it was the will of the CUP to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its special organization. The 1919 pronouncement reads as follows:

The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principal factors of these crimes the fugitives Talat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party;... the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim.

The term Three Pashas, which include Mehmed Talat Pasha and Ismail Enver, refers to the triumvirate who had fled the Empire at the end of World War I. At the trials in Constantinople in 1919 they were sentenced to death in absentia. The courts-martial officially disbanded the CUP and confiscated its assets, and the assets of those found guilty. At least two of the three were later assassinated by Armenian vigilantes.

International trials

Following the Mudros Armistice, the preliminary Peace Conference in Paris established "The Commission on Responsibilities and Sanctions" in January 1919, which was chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Lansing. Based on the commission's work, several articles were added to the Treaty of Sèvres, and the acting government of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Mehmed VI and Damat Adil Ferit Pasha, were summoned to trial. The Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) planned a trial to determine those responsible for the "barbarous and illegitimate methods of warfare... [including] offenses against the laws and customs of war and the principles of humanity".[15] Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres required the Ottoman Empire "hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914."

Various Ottoman politicians, generals, and intellectuals were transferred to Malta, where they were held for some three years while searches were made of archives in Constantinople, London, Paris and Washington to investigate their actions.[83] However, the Inter-allied tribunal attempt demanded by the Treaty of Sèvres never solidified and the detainees were eventually returned to Turkey in exchange for British citizens held by Kemalist Turkey.

Armenian population, deaths, survivors, 1914 to 1918

While there is no consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide, there is general agreement among western scholars that over 500,000 Armenians died between 1914 and 1918. Estimates vary between 300,000 (per the modern Turkish state) to 1,500,000 (per modern Armenia,[84] Argentina,[85] and other states). Encyclopædia Britannica references the research of Arnold J. Toynbee, an intelligence officer of the British Foreign Office, who estimated that 600,000 Armenians "died or were massacred during deportation" in the years 1915–1916.[86][87]

Contemporaneous reports and reactions

Hundreds of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire's own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented numerous acts of state-sponsored massacres. Many foreign officials offered to intervene on behalf of the Armenians, including Pope Benedict XV, only to be turned away by Ottoman government officials who claimed they were retaliating against a pro-Russian insurrection.[88] On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente warned the Ottoman Empire that "In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres."[89]

In addition to the consulates, there were also numerous Protestantmissionary compounds established in Armenian-populated regions, including Van and Kharput. The events were reported regularly in newspapers and literary journals around the world.[92]

Ambassador Morgenthau's Story

Ambassador Morgenthau's Story was the published memoirs of Henry Morgenthau, Sr. covering the time when he was Woodrow Wilson's American ambassador to Constantinople, 1913-1916. The book was dedicated to Wilson. The ghostwriter for Henry Morgenthau was Burton J. Hendrick. The book has been used as a primary source regarding atrocities against the Armenians. When published, the book came under criticism by two prominent American historians regarding its coverage of Germany in the weeks before the onset of the war.

As the orders for deportations and massacres were enacted, many consular officials reported to the ambassador what they were witnessing. In his memoirs, Morgenthau wrote, "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact..."[94] In memoirs and reports, their staff vividly described the brutal methods used by Ottoman forces and documented numerous instances of atrocities committed against the Christian minority.[95]

American Committee for Relief in the Near East is a relief organization established in 1915, just after the deportations, primary aim was to alleviate the suffering of the Armenian people. Henry Morgenthau played a key role in rallying support for the organization. Between 1915 and 1930, distributed humanitarian relief across a wide range of geographical locations. ACRNE eventually spent over ten times of initial estimate, see original estimate, that amount and helped an estimated close to 2,000,000 refugees[96]

In its first year, ACRNE cared for 132,000 Armenian orphans from Tiflis and YerevanConstantinople, Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem, Sivas. A relief organization for refugees in the Middle East helped donate over $102 million (budget $117,000,000) [1930 value of dollar] to Armenians both during and after the war.[97][98]

Allied forces in the Middle East

Reacting to numerous eyewitness accounts, British politician Viscount Bryce and historian Arnold J. Toynbee compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses from other countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, who similarly attested to the systematized massacring of innocent Armenians by Ottoman government forces. In 1916, they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916.[99] Although the book has since been criticized as British wartime propaganda to build up sentiment against the Central Powers, Bryce had submitted the work to scholars for verification before its publication. University of Oxford Regius Professor Gilbert Murray stated of the tome, "...the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question."[100] Other professors, including Herbert Fisher of Sheffield University and former American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, affirmed the same conclusion.[101]

Winston Churchill described the massacres as an "administrative holocaust" and noted that "the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be. [...] There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions, cherishing national ambitions that could only be satisfied at the expense of Turkey, and planted geographically between Turkish and Caucasian Moslems."[102]

Joint Austrian and German mission

As allies during the war, the Imperial German mission in the Ottoman Empire included both military and civilian components. Germany had brokered a deal with the Sublime Porte to commission the building of a railroad stretching from Berlin to the Middle East, called the Baghdad Railway. The Germans also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to the Israeli historian, Bat Ye’or, who writes: "The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, ...saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes,..."[103] German officers stationed in eastern Turkey disputed the government's assertion that Armenian revolts had broken out, suggesting that the areas were "quiet until the deportations began."[104]

Among the most famous persons to document the massacres was German military medic Armin T. Wegner. Wegner defied state censorship in taking hundreds of photographs of Armenians being deported and subsequently starving in northern Syrian camps.[105]

Germany's diplomatic mission was led by Ambassador Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim (and later Count Paul Wolff Metternich). Like Morgenthau, von Wangenheim received many disturbing messages from consul officials around the Ottoman Empire. From the province of Adana, Consul Eugene Buge reported that the CUP chief had sworn to kill and massacre any Armenians who survived the deportation marches.[106] In June 1915, von Wangenheim sent a cable to Berlin reporting that Talat had admitted the deportations were not "being carried out because of 'military considerations alone.'" One month later, he came to the conclusion that there "no longer was doubt that the Porte was trying to exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish Empire."[107]

When Wolff-Metternich succeeded von Wangenheim, he continued to dispatch similar cables: "The Committee [CUP] demands the extirpation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the government must yield.... A Committee representative is assigned to each of the provincial administrations.... Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything that is not Turkish."[108]

Another notable figure in the German military camp was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who documented various massacres of Armenians. He sent fifteen reports regarding "deportations and mass killings" to Germany's chancellor in Berlin. His final report noted that fewer than 100,000 Armenians were left alive in the Ottoman Empire; the rest had been exterminated (German: ausgerottet).[109] Scheubner-Richter also detailed the methods of the Ottoman government, noting its use of the Special Organization and other bureaucratized instruments of genocide.

Some Germans openly supported the Ottoman policy against the Armenians. As Hans Humann, the German naval attaché in Constantinople said to U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau:

I have lived in Turkey the larger part of my life ... and I know the Armenians. I also know that both Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country. One of these races has got to go. And I don't blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians. I think that they are entirely justified. The weaker nation must succumb. The Armenians desire to dismember Turkey; they are against the Turks and the Germans in this war, and they therefore have no right to exist here.[110]

In a genocide conference in 2001, professor Wolfgang Wipperman of the Free University of Berlin introduced documents evidencing that the German High Command was aware of the mass killings at the time but chose not to interfere or speak out.[111]

Russian military

The Russian Empire's response to the bombardment of its Black Sea naval ports was primarily a land campaign through the Caucasus. Early victories against the Ottoman Empire from the winter of 1914 to the spring 1915 saw significant gains of territory, including relieving the Armenian bastion resisting in the city of Van in May 1915. The Russians also reported encountering the bodies of unarmed civilian Armenians as they advanced.[112] In March 1916, the scenes they saw in the city of Erzerum led the Russians to retaliate against the Ottoman III Army whom they held responsible for the massacres, destroying it in its entirety.[113]

Swedish Embassy and Military Attaché

Sweden, as a neutral state during the entire World War I, had permanent representatives in the Ottoman Empire, able to continuously report on the ongoing events in the country. The Swedish Embassy in Constantinople, represented by Ambassador Per Gustaf August Cosswa Anckarsvärd, along with Envoy M. Ahlgren, and the Swedish Military Attaché, Captain Einar af Wirsén, closely followed the development throughout the empire, reporting, among others, on the Armenian massacres. On July 7, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched a two-page report to Stockholm, beginning with the following information:

The persecutions of the Armenians have reached hair-raising proportions and all points to the fact that the Young Turks want to seize the opportunity, since due to different reasons there are no effective external pressure to be feared, to once and for all put an end to the Armenian question. The means for this are quite simple and consist of the extermination (utrotandet) of the Armenian nation.[114]

During the remainder of 1915 alone, Anckarsvärd dispatched six other reports entitled "The Persecutions of the Armenians". In his report on July 22, Anckarsvärd noted that the persecutions of the Armenians were being extended to encompass all Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Quoting the statement of the Greek chargé d'affaires:

[The deportations] can not be any other issue than an annihilation war against the Greek nation in Turkey and as measures hereof they have been implementing forced conversions to Islam, in obvious aim to, that if after the end of the war there again would be a question of European intervention for the protection of the Christians, there will be as few of them left as possible.[115]

On August 9, 1915, Anckarsvärd dispatched yet another report, confirming his suspicions regarding the plans of the Turkish government, "It is obvious that the Turks are taking the opportunity to, now during the war, annihilate [utplåna] the Armenian nation so that when the peace comes no Armenian question longer exists."[116]

When reflecting upon the situation in Turkey during the final stages of the war, Envoy Alhgren presented an analysis of the prevailing situation in Turkey and the hard times which had befallen the population. In explaining the increased living costs he identified a number of reasons: "obstacles for domestic trade, the almost total paralysing of the foreign trade and finally the strong decreasing of labour power, caused partly by the mobilisation but partly also by the extermination of the Armenian race [utrotandet af den armeniska rasen]."[117]

Wirsén, when writing his memoirs from his mission to the Balkans and Turkey, Minnen från fred och krig (“Memories from Peace and War”), dedicated an entire chapter to the Armenian genocide, entitled Mordet på en nation (“The Murder of a Nation”). Commenting the deportations as a result of accusing the Armenians for collaboration with the Russians, Wirsén concludes that the subsequent deportations were nothing but a cover for the extermination: "Officially, these had the goal to move the entire Armenian population to the steppe regions of Northern Mesopotamia and Syria, but in reality they aimed to exterminate [utrota] the Armenians, whereby the pure Turkish element in Asia Minor would achieve a dominating position."[118]

In conclusion, Wirsén made the following note: "The annihilation of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor must revolt all human feelings...The way the Armenian problem was solved was hair-raising. I can still see in front of me Talaat’s cynical expression, when he emphasized that the Armenian question was solved."[119]

Study of the Armenian Genocide

Historical work on the genocide has been almost entirely pro-Armenian or pro-Turkish and therefore implicated in a political conflict still unresolved today. Armenian historians seek to exorcise the trauma experienced by earlier generations, to pass on the memory of this trauma, and to present the genocide of the Armenians as the founding element of contemporary Armenian identity.

British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose 1917 report remains a critical primary source, changed his evaluation later in life, concluding, "These…Armenian political aspirations had not been legitimate....Their aspirations did not merely threaten to break up the Turkish Empire; they could not be fulfilled without doing grave injustice to the Turkish people itself."[120]

For Turkish historians, supporting the national republican myth is essential to preserving Turkish national unity. The usual Turkish argument is that the deportations were necessary because the Armenians had allied themselves with the Russian army in wartime, and argue that around 600,000 Armenians perished during the marches, largely due to isolated massacres, disease, or malnourishment.[121] "There was no genocide committed against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before or during World War I." [122] Dissident historians in Turkey are trying to reclaim the Armenians as part of Ottoman and Turkish history and acknowledge the wrongs done to the Armenians as a condition for reconciliation with them on the basis of confidence in Turkish national unity.[123]

Defining genocide

Hebrew University scholar Yehuda Bauer suggests of the Armenian Genocide, "This is the closest parallel to the Holocaust."[124] He nonetheless distinguishes several key differences between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, particularly in regard to motivation:

[T]he Nazis saw the Jews as the central problem of world history. Upon its solution depended the future of mankind. Unless International Jewry was defeated, human civilization would not survive. The attitude towards the Jews had in it important elements of pseudo-religion. There was no such motivation present in the Armenian case; Armenians were to be annihilated for power-political reasons, and in Turkey only... The differences between the holocaust and the Armenian massacres are less important than the similarities—and even if the Armenian case is not seen as a holocaust in the extreme form which it took towards Jews, it is certainly the nearest thing to it.[124]

Bauer has also suggested that the Armenian Genocide is best understood, not as having begun in 1915, but rather as "an ongoing genocide, from 1896, through 1908/9, through World War I and right up to 1923."[125]Lucy Dawidowicz also alludes to these earlier massacres as at least as significant as WWI era events:

In 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was tearing France apart, Bernard Lazare, a French Jew active in Dreyfus's defense, addressed a group of Jewish students in Paris on the subject of anti-Semitism. "For the Christian peoples," he remarked, "an Armenian solution" to their Jew-hatred was available. He was referring to the Turkish massacres of Armenians, which in their extent and horror most closely approximated the murder of European Jews. But, Lazare went on, "their sensibilities cannot allow them to envisage that." The once unthinkable "Armenian solution" became, in our time, the achievable "Final Solution," the Nazi code name for the annihilation of the European Jews.[126]

In 2002, the International Center for Transitional Justice was asked by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission to provide a report on the applicability of the Genocide Convention to the controversy. The ICTJ report ruled that it was a genocide, and further that the Republic of Turkey was not liable for the event.[130]

In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed[131] that scholarly evidence revealed the "Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches" and condemned Turkish attempts to deny its factual and moral reality. In 2007, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity produced a letter signed by 53 Nobel Laureates re-affirming the Genocide Scholars' conclusion that the 1915 killings of Armenians constituted genocide.[132][133]

While some consider denial to be a form of hate speech or politically-minded historical revisionism, several western academics have expressed doubts as to the genocidal character of the events.[134][135][136] The most important counterpoint may be that of British scholar Bernard Lewis. While he had once written of "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and a half Armenians perished",[137] he later came to believe that the term "genocide" was distinctly inaccurate, because the "tremendous massacres"[138] were not "a deliberate preconceived decision of the Turkish government."[139] This opinion has been joined by Guenter Lewy.[140]

Academic views within the Republic of Turkey are often at odds with international consensus: this may partly stem from the fact that to acknowledge the Armenian genocide in Turkey carries with it a risk of criminal prosecution. Many Turkish intellectuals have been prosecuted for characterizing the massacres as genocide,[141][142] including Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who was prosecuted three times for "denigrating Turkishness" for his having criticized the Turkish state's denial of the Armenian Genocide.[143] In 2007, Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist.[144] Later, photographs of the assassin being honored as a hero while in police custody, posing in front of the Turkish flag with grinning policemen,[145] gave the academic community still more pause in regard to engaging the Armenian issue.[146]

Bat Ye'or has suggested that "the genocide of the Armenians was a jihad."[147] Ye'or holds jihad and what she calls "dhimmitude" to be among the "principles and values" that led to the Armenian Genocide.[148] This perspective is challenged by Fà'iz el-Ghusein, a Bedouin Arab witness of the Armenian persecution, whose 1918 treatise aimed "to refute beforehand inventions and slanders against the Faith of Islam and against Moslems generally... [W]hat the Armenians have suffered is to be attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress... [I]t has been due to their nationalist fanaticism and their jealousy of the Armenians, and to these alone; the Faith of Islam is guiltless of their deeds."[149] Arnold Toynbee writes that "the Young Turks made Pan-Islamism and Turkish Nationalism work together for their ends, but the development of their policy shows the Islamic element receding and the Nationalist gaining ground."[150] Toynbee, and various other sources, report that many Armenians were spared death by marrying into Turkish families or converting to Islam. El-Ghusein points out that many converts were put to death, concerned that Westerners would come to regard the "extermination of the Armenians"[151] as "a black stain on the history of Islam, which ages will not efface."[152] In one instance, when an Islamic leader appealed to spare Armenian converts to Islam, El-Ghusein quotes a government functionary as responding that "politics have no religion", before sending the converts to their deaths.[151]

Noam Chomsky has suggested that, rather than the Armenian Genocide having been relegated to the periphery of public awareness, "more people are aware of the Armenian genocide during the First World War than are aware of the Indonesian genocide in 1965".[153]Taner Akcam's A Shameful Act has contextualized the Armenian Genocide with the desperate Ottoman struggle at Gallipoli, suggesting that panic of imminent destruction caused Ottoman authorities to opt for deportation and extermination.[154]

On October 10, 2009 in Zurich, despite overwhelming opposition by Armenians in Armenia and in the Diaspora, the Armenian government signed the Armenia-Turkey Protocols, one of the provisions of which stipulates the establishment of a research commission "to study the two country's historical grievances."[155] The agreement must still be ratified by the parliaments of both countries in order to take effect.

Just a day before, on 9 October 2009 in London, Geoffrey Robertson QC, eminent jurist, barrister and judge, has published a detailed legal opinion, entitled "Was there an Armenian Genocide?" which comprehensively and methodically demolished British Government's reasons for not formally recognising the Armenian Genocide.

Republic of Turkey and the Genocide

The Republic of Turkey's formal stance is that the deaths of Armenians during the "relocation" or "deportation" cannot aptly be deemed "genocide," a position that has been supported with a plethora of diverging justifications: that the killings were not deliberate or were not governmentally orchestrated, that the killings were justified because Armenians posed a Russian-sympathizing threat[156] as a cultural group, that Armenians merely starved, or any of various characterizations recalling marauding "Armenian gangs."[157][158][159] Some suggestions seek to invalidate the genocide on semantic or anachronistic grounds (the word "genocide" was not coined until 1943). Turkish World War I casualty figures are often cited to mitigate the effect of the number of Armenian dead.[160]

Turkish governmental sources have asserted that the historically-demonstrated "tolerance of Turkish people"[161] itself renders the Armenian Genocide an impossibility. One military document leverages eleventh century history to cast doubt on the Armenian Genocide: "It was the Seljuk Turks who saved the Armenians that came under the Turkish domination in 1071 from the Byzantine persecution and granted them the right to live as a man should."[161] A Der Spiegel article addressed this modern Turkish conception of history thus:

Would you admit to the crimes of your grandfathers, if these crimes didn't really happen?" asked ambassador Öymen. But the problem lies precisely in this question, says Hrant Dink, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Istanbul-based Armenian weekly Agos. Turkey's bureaucratic elite have never really shed themselves of the Ottoman tradition — in the perpetrators, they see their fathers, whose honor they seek to defend. This tradition instills a sense of identity in Turkish nationalists — both from the left and the right, and it is passed on from generation to generation through the school system. This tradition also requires an antipole against which it could define itself. Since the times of the Ottoman Empire, religious minorities have been pushed into this role.[162]

In 2005, Turkish Prime MinisterRecep Tayyip Erdoğan invited Turkish, Armenian and international historians to form a commission to re-evaluate the "events of 1915" (his preferred description[163]) by using archives in Turkey, Armenia and other countries.[164] Armenian president Robert Kocharian rejected this offer by saying, "It is the responsibility of governments to develop bilateral relations and we do not have the right to delegate that responsibility to historians. That is why we have proposed and propose again that, without pre-conditions, we establish normal relations between our two countries."[165]}}

Additionally, Turkish foreign minister of the time, Abdullah Gül, invited the United States and other countries to contribute to such a commission by appointing scholars to "investigate this tragedy and open ways for Turks and Armenians to come together".[166] The Turkish government continues to protest against the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries and to dispute that there ever was a genocide.

Controversies

Efforts by the Turkish government and its agents to quash mention of the genocide have resulted in numerous scholarly, diplomatic, political and legal controversies. Prosecutors acting on their own initiative have utilized Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting "insulting Turkishness" to silence a number of prominent Turkish intellectuals who spoke of atrocities suffered by Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire (as of yet, most of these cases have been dismissed).[167] These prosecutions have often been accompanied by hate campaigns and threats, as was the case for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian intellectual murdered in 2007. The leading lawyer behind the prosecutions, Kemal Kerincsiz, is under investigation for complicity in the underground Ergenekon network.

In 1982, the Israeli Foreign Ministry attempted to prevent an international conference on genocide, held in Tel Aviv, from including any mention of the Armenian Genocide. Several reports suggested that Turkey had warned that Turkish Jews might face "reprisals", if the conference permitted Armenian participation.[168] This charge was "categorically denied" by Turkey;[169] the Israeli Foreign Ministry supported Turkey in this protestation that there had been no threats against Jews, suggesting that its misgivings as to the genocide conference were based on considerations "vital to the Jewish nation."[170]

A 1989 U.S. Senate proposal to recognize the Armenian Genocide stoked the ire of Turkey. The proposal occurred in the context of the publication of internal U.S. documents which laid out a State Department official's eyewitness report that "thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered", in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.[171] Turkey responded by blocking United States Navy visits to Turkey and suspending some U.S. military training facilities on Turkish territory.[171] The American scholar who assembled the U.S. archive documents for publication went into hiding after a series of anonymous threats.[171]

In 1990, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States, questioning his inclusion of references to the Armenian Genocide in one of his books. The ambassador inadvertently included a draft of the letter, presented by scholar Heath W. Lowry, advising the ambassador on how to prevent mention of the Armenian Genocide in scholarly works.[172] In 1996, Lowry was named to a chair at Princeton University that had been financed by the Turkish government, sparking a debate on ethics in scholarship.[173][174]

According to some newly discovered documents that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, over 970,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916. These documents have been published in a recent book titled The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha written by the Turkish historian Murat Bardakçı (aka "Talat Pasha's Black Book"). The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations. The documents were given to Mr. Bardakçi by Mr. Talat’s widow, Hayriye, in 1983. According to the documents, the number of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire before 1915 stood at 1,256,000. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later in 1917.[175]

Armenia and the Genocide

Armenia has been involved in a protracted ethnic-territorial conflict with Azerbaijan, a Turkic state, since Azerbaijan became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. The conflict has featured several pogroms, massacres, and waves of ethnic cleansing, by both sides. Some foreign policy observers and historians have suggested that Armenia and the Armenian diaspora have sought to portray the modern conflict as a continuation of the Armenian Genocide, in order to influence modern policy-making in the region.[176][177] According to Thomas Ambrosio, the Armenian Genocide furnishes "a reserve of public sympathy and moral legitimacy that translates into significant political influence... to elicit congressional support for anti-Azerbaijan policies."[176]

The rhetoric leading up to the onset of the conflict, which unfolded in the context of several pogroms of Armenians, was dominated by references to the Armenian Genocide, including fears that it would be, or was in the course of being, repeated.[178][179] During the conflict, the Azeri and Armenian governments regularly accused each other of genocidal intent, although these claims have been treated skeptically by outside observers.[177]

Recognition of the Genocide

Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Resolution, April 24, 1998

"Today we commemorate the anniversary of what has been called the first genocide of the 20th century, and we salute the memory of the Armenian victims of this crime against humanity"[9].

As a response to the continuing denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish State, many activists among Armenian Diaspora communities have pushed for formal recognition of the Armenian genocide from various governments around the world. 20 countries and 42 U.S. states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as a bona fide historical event. On March 4, 2010, a US congressional panel narrowly voted that the incident was indeed genocide; within minutes the Turkish government issued a statement critical of "this resolution which accuses the Turkish nation of a crime it has not committed."

Cultural loss

The premeditated destruction of objects of Armenian cultural, religious, historical and communal heritage was yet another key purpose of both the genocide itself and the post-genocidal campaign of denial. Armenian churches and monasteries were destroyed, Armenian cemeteries flattened, and, in several cities (e.g. Van), Armenian quarters were demolished.[180]

In 1914, the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople presented a list of the Armenian holy sites under his supervision. The list contained 2,549 religious places of which 200 were monasteries while 1,600 were churches. In 1974 UNESCO stated that after 1923, out of 913 Armenian historical monuments left in Eastern Turkey, 464 have vanished completely, 252 are in ruins, and 197 are in need of repair (in stable conditions).[181][182]

Commemoration

Memorials

In 1965, the 50th anniversary of the genocide, a 24-hour mass protest was initiated in Yerevan demanding recognition of the Armenian Genocide by Soviet authorities. The memorial was completed two years later, at Tsitsernakaberd above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The 44 metres (144 ft) stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. Twelve slabs are positioned in a circle, representing 12 lost provinces in present day Turkey. At the center of the circle there is an eternal flame. Each April 24, hundreds of thousands of people walk to the genocide monument and lay flowers around the eternal flame.

Art

The earliest example of the Armenian genocide on art was a medal issued in St. Petersburg, signifying Russian sympathy for Armenian suffering. It was struck in 1915, as the massacres and deportations were still raging. Since then, dozens of medals in different countries have been commissioned to commemorate the event.[185]

Several eyewitness accounts of the events were published, notably those of Swedish missionary Alma Johansson and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr. German medic Armin Wegner wrote several books about the events he witnessed while stationed in the Ottoman Empire. Years later, having returned to Germany, Wegner was imprisoned for opposing Nazism,[186] and his books were subjected to Nazi book burnings.[187] Probably the best known literary work on the Armenian Genocide is Franz Werfel's 1933 The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. It was a bestseller that became particularly popular among the youth of the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi era.[188]

The paintings of Armenian-American Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure of Abstract Expressionism, were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss of the period.[190] In 1915, at age 10, Gorky fled his native Van and escaped to Russian-Armenia with his mother and three sisters, only to have his mother die of starvation in Yerevan in 1919. His The Artist and His Mother painting is based on a photograph with his mother taken in Armenia before his mother's passing.

American composer and singer Daniel Decker has achieved critical acclaim for his collaborations with Armenian composer Ara Gevorgyan. The song "Adana", named for the province of a 1909 pogrom of the Armenian people, tells the story of the Armenian Genocide. "Adana" has been translated into 17 languages and recorded by singers around the world.[192]

The American band System of a Down, composed of four descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, has promoted awareness of the Armenian Genocide, through its lyrics and concerts.[193]

In late 2003, Diamanda Galás released the album Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead, an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek victims of the genocide in Turkey. "The performance is an angry meditation on genocide and the politically cooperative denial of it, in particular the Turkish and American denial of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides from 1914 to 1923".[194]

^ Article 16 stated that "As the evacuation of the Russian troops of the territory they occupy in Armenia ... might give rise to conflicts and complications detrimental to the maintenance of good relations between the two countries, the Sublime Porte engaged to carry into effect, without further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by Armenians and to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians."

^ The German Foreign Ministry operative, Ernst Jackh, estimated that 200,000 Armenians were killed and a further 50,000 expelled from the provinces during the Hamidian unrest. French diplomats placed the figures to 250,000 killed. The German pastor Johannes Lepsius was more meticulous in his calculations, counting the deaths of 88,000 Armenians and the destruction of 2,500 villages, 645 churches and monasteries, and the plundering of hundreds of churches, of which 328 were converted into mosques.

^The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs By Viscount Bryce. New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, for His Majesty's Stationary Office, London, 1916, pp. 637–653.

Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (2005), scholarly history of the wartime massacres; 344 pages excerpt and text search

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It may look amazing, but the reality that what happened in 1915 was
a mass murder was accepted by everybody having lived in that
period, and was never the object of an argument... ~ Taner Akçam

Quotations arranged alphabetically by
author

It may look amazing, but the reality that what happened
in 1915 was a mass murder was accepted by everybody having lived in
that period, and was never the object of an argument. Of
course the word soykirim [genocide] (being a term belonging to the
post World War II period) was not used in those days. To describe
what had happened in 1915, words such as "katliam" [massacre],
"taktil" [killings], "teb'id" [taking away, expulsion, expelling],
"kital" [massacre] were used. Mustafa Kemal has dozens of
speeches in which he defines the treatments reserved to Armenians
as "cowardice", or "barbarity", and names these treatments
"massacre". In September 1919, the American General
Harbord, who visited Mustafa Kemal in Sivas, says "he, too,
disapproved the Armenian Massacre." According to Mustafa Kemal,
"the massacre and deportation of Armenians was the work of a small
committee who had seized the power."

What I want to explain is the following: the fact that
what happened in 1915 was a mass murder was not even the subject of
an argument in any manner from the viewpoint of the actors of that
period, with Mustafa Kemal at their head. The main
discussion of that period was organized around the axis of the
deliberations of Paris, and it was about how the "Turks" should be
punished for the Armenian Massacre. To put the criminals on trial
was one form of punishment. Another form was the partition of Anatolia. That is, the Western Powers were
hiding their imperial ambitions mainly behind the reality of
Armenians having been killed. Mustafa Kemal and his friends
accepted the reality that those responsible of the massacre should
be punished, but opposed that this punishment be in the form of the
partition of Anatolia. Today, rather than producing lies
and legends, if we make the position of Mustafa Kemal on this
subject our departure point, and continue our discussion from
there, we shall have covered a fairly long distance.

Taner Akçam, historian and sociologist,
in "1915 Legends and Realities" in the Turkish daily "Radikal" (25
May 2003) as translated by Dikran D./Anna K. Piranian

A discussion of the Armenian Genocide could reveal that
this Turkish state was not a result of a war fought against the
imperial powers, but, on the contrary, a product of the war against
the Greek and Armenian minorities. It could show that a
significant part of the National Forces consisted either of
murderers who directly participated in the Armenian Genocide or of
thieves who had become rich by plundering Armenian possessions.

Taner Akçam, historian and sociologist in
The Genocide of Armenians and the silence of the
Turks

I would like to ask a very simple, ordinary question.
Would you wish to be an Armenian in 1915? No, you wouldn't. Because
now you know you would have been killed. Please stop arguing about
the number of murdered or the denials or the attempts to replace
pain with statistics. No one is denying that Armenians
were murdered, right? It may be 300,000, or 500,000, or 1.5
million. I don't know which number is the truth, or whether anyone
knows the true number accurately. What I do know is the
existence of the death and pain beyond these numbers. ...we are
talking about human beings. When we hear about a baby pulled from a
mother's hands to be dashed on the rocks, or a youth shot to death
beside a hill, or an old woman throttled by her slender neck, even
the hard-hearted among us will be ashamed to say, 'Yes, but these
people killed the Turks.' Most of these people did not kill anyone.
These people became the innocent victims of a crazed government
powered by murder, pitiless but also totally incompetent in
governing. This bloody insanity was a barbarism, not something for
us to take pride in or be part of. This was a slaughter
that we should be ashamed of, and, if possible, something that we
can sympathize with and share the pain. What is more important for
me is the fact that many innocent people were killed so
barbarically. When I see the shadow of this bloody event on the
present world, I see a greater injustice done to the Armenians. I
have nothing in common with the terrible sin of the past
Ittihadists, but the sin of not allowing grief for the dead belongs
to all of us today. Do you really want to commit this sin? Hundreds
of thousands of human beings were murdered. Hundreds of thousands
of lives snuffed out. The fact that some Armenian gangs murdered
some Turks cannot be an excuse to mask the truth that hundreds of
thousands of Armenians were murdered. A human being of
conscience is capable of grieving for the Armenians, as well as the
Turks, as well as the Kurds. We all should. Babies died; women and
old people died. They died in pain, tormented, terrified. Is it
really so important what religion or race these murdered people
had? Even in these terrifying times there were Turks who risked
their lives trying to rescue Armenian children. We are the children
of these rescuers, as well as the children of the murderers.
Instead of justifying and arguing on behalf of the murderers, why
don't we praise and defend the rescuers' compassion, honesty, and
courage? There are no more victims left to be rescued
today, but there is a grief, a pain, to be shared and supported.
If nothing moves in you when you hear a baby wail as her
mother is murdered, I have nothing to say to you. Then add my name
to the list of "traitors." Because I am ready to share the grief
and pain with the Armenians. Because I still believe there is
something yet to be rescued from all these meaningless and pitiless
arguments, and that something is called 'humanity.'

I was condemned by the Turkish authorities for
condemning and recognizing the genocide. I spent the years
of 1985-1987 in Istanbul's jail as a political prisoner together
with my wife and newborn child...Turkey's whole intelligentsia is
now in shame for distorting the historical reality and not
recognizing the Armenian Genocide...I am here today to declare that
I assume historical responsibility. Recognition for me is not only
a moral but also political and public matter, because as German
Bernhard Schlink says: "The one who lives in peace with the
criminal also becomes responsible...I am grateful to you also for
allowing me, a man representing a society that committed crimes, to
remember and pay homage to the memory of every victim and to ponder
about the disgrace and dishonor of my nation. I dream that every
Armenian who lost his or her ancestor during the years of the
genocide will return and find a secure place in the country that is
called Turkey today. I hope that my dreams will come true. If it is
fulfilled, and that must be fulfilled, at that time I will apply
for Turkish citizenship and will say: I am yours. And I am here
again."

Surely a few Armenians aided and abetted our enemy, and a few
Armenian Deputies committed crimes against the Turkish nation... it
is incumbent upon a government to pursue the guilty ones.
Unfortunately, our wartime leaders, imbued with a spirit of
brigandage, carried out the law of deportation in a manner that
could surpass the proclivities of the most bloodthirsty bandits.
They decided to exterminate the Armenians, and they did
exterminate them.

These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should
have been made to account for the millions of our Christian
subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and
massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule.

You Armenians... never forgot where you live... you accursed
ones have brought many perils on the head of our esteemed
government... paved the way for foreign assault... You must know
that the Young Turks have awakened now... Turkish youth... shall
not delay the execution of their assigned duties... The Turkish
sword to date has cut down millions of giavours, nor has it lost
its intention to cut millions more hereafter. Know this that the
Turks have committed themselves, and have vowed to subdue and to
clean up the Armenian giavours who have become tubercular microbes
for us.

Huseyin Azmi, Director General of the Istanbul Police, in two
letters to the Armenian Patriarch in Istanbul (12 November
1913)

Jamal Pasha [then Turkish military ruler in Palestine] planned
from the outset to destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz
Yisrael, exactly as they did the Armenians in Armenia

David
Ben-Gurion, in a letter to his father from 1919, as reported by
Yair Auron in The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the
Armenian Genocide - p 325

[What actually happened in 1915-16] was no accident, this was
not a marginal or small thing, it was not a geographically or
demographically limited thing, virtually the entirety of Ottoman
Armenians has been ordered to be rounded up, socially deracinated,
uprooted, dispossesses, and deported for no reason other than that
they were Armenians and, secondly, that there was very strong
evidence that the accompanied violence and massacres had not
started spontaneously or despite the best intentions of the state
to protect the convoys of the deportees. Rather, there was strong
evidence to the effect that there were orders issued, disseminated,
and executed through the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa and that this in turn
triggered secondary and tertiary rounds of violence and massacres
once it became clear that the Armenians were fair game and that the
shooting season was open on them. It fits the clauses of the 1948
UN convention [on genocide] comprehensively, and in that light, if
we are permitted to take those categorizations and apply them to an
event that occurred 33 years earlier, then we have to say,
"Yes, it was genocide"

Halil Berktay - The Specter of the
Armenian Genocide - An Interview with Halil Bektay - by Katchig
Mouradian (1 November 2005)

At that time (1915) there were 1 million and 750 thousand
Armenians living in Eastern Anatolia. The deportation order issued
by the ruling military triumvirate was drawn up so as to include
all the Armenians in the region, without exception. These things
are documented in writing. There was no mention of massacres or
slaughter. The provincial governors and garrison commanders were
directed to deport the Armenians to the region south of Turkey's
current borders. However, it's clear that, in addition to
these official orders, separate, non-written orders were given to
the most rapacious members of the "Teskilat-i Mahsusa" ["Special
Organization"], who worshipped violence and were not bound by
adherence to any normal moral code. Those who issued these
orders had them carried out via a special organization, the
Teskilat-i Mahsusa... It is clear that Bahaettin Sakir, who
operated as the Teskilat-i Mahsusa's man for Enver, Cemal, and Talat, set up death squads in the
region. Some of these people were convicted criminals who
were saved from the gallows and released from prison just to carry
out such activities... The whole affair is that simple and clear.
In addition to them, Turkish and Kurdish tribes also attacked the
convoys of Armenians being deported. In addition to these
actual massacres, there were the terrible losses caused by the
deportations carred out in appalling conditions of deprivation.
Everywhere in the Western world, there are photographs of these
incidents which we can't bear to look at. The first time I
encountered these visual records, I cried and could hardly breathe
for several minutes. They are no different from the images of the
concentration camps, or the massacres in Africa. For there are huge
numbers of people in these pictures.

Halil Berktay, specialist in Turkish
history of the 19th and 20th centuries, has taught at Harvard
University, the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and
Bogazici (Bosporus) University in Istanbul, from an interview
published in the Turkish newspaper Radikal (9 October
2000)

By 1912-13, and especially after the traumatic Balkan
wars, the unionist leadership had already acquired a comprehensive
ethnic cleansing mentality. They had arrived at the
crystallization of their own version of Social Darwinistic,
violent, anxious, and, therefore, malicious and malevolent unionist
nationalism. That is to say, it was their ideology that was telling
them "we cannot have a patriotic self defense unless and until we
have an Anatolia that has been comprehensively Turkified." That is
to say, they had acquired a nationalist ideological perspective of
regarding all non-Turks as suspect, hostile elements. It was this
ideology that led to the tehcir and the accompanying orders.
It was this ideology, in turn, which lead to the horrors of
1915... it was the Ottoman state versus all Armenians. It was state
declaring war on its subjects.

Halil Berktay , in "Specter of the
Armenian Genocide - An Interview with Halil Bektay" by Katchig
Mouradian (1 November 2005)

All that I have seen and heard surpasses all
imagination. Speaking of "thousand and one horrors" is very little
in this case, I thought I was passing through a part of
hell... everywhere it is the same Governmental barbarism
which aims at the systematic annihilation through starvation of the
survivors of the Armenian nation in Turkey.

August Bernau, Aleppo Agent of the Vacuum Oil Company of New
York, September 10, 1916 US State Department Record Group 59,
867.4016/302

One of the expressions of Cetin Altan that I like the most is
"the propaganda of Turks aiming at Turks." On all international
issues, we very much like to propagandize to each other — a
propaganda which is not based on realities. On the issue of the
"so-called genocide," too, we like very much to propagandize to
ourselves. First of all, we start by indicating that the allegation
is about a "so-called" genocide. ...the Council of the Higher
Education, YOK...sent a series of instructions to university
rectors and deans and aimed to begin to train educators on this
issue. YOK would determine in advance what and how scientists would
think about the "Armenian Deportation," and the latter would work
in the light of that. There you are — a scientific study in the
Turkish style! ...it was decided by the Commission of the
Instruction and Education that the subjects relating to the
Armenian, Pontus Greek and Assyrian allegations...are groundless.
...every effort will be made so that, first, it is recognized that
the "so-called Armenian Genocide" is a "so-called" one, then, by
means of propaganda, those denials will be taught to children and
youth and will be engraved in their minds. It is written in the
editorial of the weekly "Agos" that the same is requested from
Armenian schools; it is required that young Armenians also form
sentences denying "the groundless Armenian allegations. In reality,
this propaganda is more deceptive for Turkish children: the
Armenian child will hear one way or another from his family,
relatives and eyewitnesses still living why the number of Armenians
living in this country dropped from 2 million to 60,000. He will
also know that he needs to say at school the opposite of what he
hears at home. What happened in history did happen. It is
impossible to fight against realities. Should German people defend
Hitler, who assassinated millions of Jews for the simple reason
that he is German? 1915 is one of the painful pages of the Ottoman
history: on this date, the Committee of Union and Progress
committed a huge crime against humanity. Why should I take the
responsibility for that crime, and oppose the historical truths by
asserting that all of this did not take place? Why shall we mislead
young brains with lies? What kind of damage does such a propaganda
cause in the brains of the youth. What will this society gain, by
educating the youth with legends that are unreal?

Oral Calislar, from the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet (12
May 2003)

I have the honor to report to the Embassy about one of
the most severest measures ever taken by any government and one of
the greatest tragedies in all history. Practically every
male Armenian of any consequence at all here has been arrested and
put into prison. A great many of them were subjected to the most
cruel tortures under which some of them died. Several hundred of
the leading Armenians were sent away at night and it seems to be
clearly established that most, if not all, of them were killed.
Last week there were well founded rumors of a threatened massacre.
I think there is very little doubt that one is planned.
Another method was found, to destroy the Armenian race.
This is no less than the deportation of the entire Armenian
population, not only from this Vilayet, but, I understand, from all
six Vilayets comprising Armenia. There are said to be
about sixty thousand Armenians in this Vilayet and about a million
in the six Vilayets. All of these are to be sent into exile; an
undertaking greater, probably, than anything of the kind in all
history. For several days last week there were rumors of this but
it seemed incredible. On Saturday, June 28th, it was publicly
announced that all Armenians and Syrians [Assyrians of the Armenian
Apostolic faith] were to leave after five days. The full
meaning of such an order can scarcely be imagined by those who are
not familiar with the peculiar conditions of this isolated region.
A massacre, however horrible the word may sound, would be humane in
comparison with it. In a massacre many escape but a wholesale
deportation of this kind in this country means a lingering and
perhaps even more dreadful death for nearly every one. I do not
believe it possible for one in a hundred to survive, perhaps not
one in a thousand. Whatever the destination may be, the
journey from here in that direction at this season of the year is
very difficult for one who has made careful preparations and
travels by wagon. It is for the most part an extremely hot plain in
which there s very little water or vegetation. There are places
where there is no water at all during an entire day's journey by
wagon. A crowd of women and children on foot will, of course,
require several days to traverse the same distance. They cannot go
from from here to Urfa in less than fifteen or twenty days.
...there will be days when neither food nor water can be obtained.
People on foot cannot carry enough food or water on their
backs to last them between towns. Under the most favorable
conditions the journey is a very fatiguing one. For people
traveling as these Armenians who are going into exile will be
obliged to travel it is certain death for by far the greater part
of them. The fate of these people can readily be imagined. The
method is perhaps a little more cultured than a massacre but it it
will be far more effective and thorough. It is quite
probable that many of them will be robbed and murdered en route as
the roads are now filled with bands of pillaging Kurds. In
any case, it is quite certain that almost all will die in one way
or another before they ever reach their destination. It is
impossible for me to give any adequate idea of the panic in this
locality that has resulted from the announcement of this order of
expulsion. Every one who is obliged to leave is trying to get
together a little money to take on the journey. The Turks are, of
course, taking advantage of the situation to get things at
practically nothing. Robbery and looting were never undertaken in a
more wholesale manner. Turkish men and Turkish women are entering
the houses of all the Armenians and taking things at almost any
price. The scene reminds one of a lot of hungry vultures hovering
over the remains of those who have fallen by the way. I have never
seen a more pathetic or tragic scene. All feel that they are going
to certain death and they have good reason to feel that way. All
the real estate belonging to the Armenians will be confiscated by
the Government. The effect industrially and commercially of the
expulsion of the Armenians from this region is going to throw it
back in the middle ages. Tomorrow the exodus of one-half of the
population of this region commences. Were there people not so
entirely subdued I should expect to see some stirring scenes. As it
is, I can hardly think it possible that the authorities will
succeed in sending everyone into exile, but a yet there does not
seem to be any sign of their relenting or of their granting many
exemptions.

Leslie A. Davis, American Vice Consul in Harput Turkey, in a
report to US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morganthau (30
June 1915) - U.S. National Archives. D.S. Record Group 59, Dec.
File No. 867.4016/269

Now it has just been announced by public crier that on
Tuesday, July 13th, every Armenian without exception, must go. If
it were simply a matter of being obliged to leave here and go
somewhere else it would not be so bad, but everyone knows it is a
case of going to one's death. I have visited their
encampment a number of times and talked with some of the people. A
more pitiable sight cannot be imagined. They were almost without
exception ragged, filthy, hungry and sick. This is not surprising
in view of the fact that they have been on the road for nearly two
months with no change of clothing, no chance to wash, no shelter
and little to eat. There are very few men among them, as most have
been killed on the road. All tell the same story of having been
attacked and robbed by the Kurds. Most of them were attacked over
and over again and a great many of them, especially the men were
killed. Women and children were also killed. Many died, of course,
from sickness and exhaustion on the way and there have been deaths
each day that they have been there. Several different parties have
arrived and after remaining a day or two have been pushed with no
apparent destination. Those who have reached here are only a small
portion, however, of those who started. By continuing to drive
these people people on in this way it will be possible to dispose
of all of them in a comparatively short time. The condition of
these people indicated clearly the fate of those who have left and
are about to leave from here. I believe nothing has been heard from
any of them as yet and probably very little will be heard. The
system that is being followed seems to be to have bands of Kurds
awaiting them on the roads to kill the men especially and
incidentally some of the others. The entire movement seems
to be the thoroughly organized and effective massacre this country
has ever seen. Not many men have been spared, however, to
accompany those who are being sent into exile, for a more prompt
and sure method has been used to dispose of them. Several thousand
Armenian men been arrested during the past few weeks. These have
been put into prison and each time that several hundred had been
gathered up in that way they were sent away during the night. There
have been frequent rumors that all of these were killed and there
is little doubt that they were. All Armenian soldiers [In the
Turkish army] have likewise been sent away in the same manor. On
Monday many men were arrested both at Harput and Mezreh and put in
prison. At daybreak Tuesday morning they were taken out and made to
march toward an almost uninhabited mountain. There were about eight
hundred in all and they were tied together in groups of fourteen
each. That afternoon they arrived in a small Kurdish village where
they were kept over night in the mosque and other buildings. During
this time they were without food or water. On Wednesday morning
they were taken to a valley a few hours distant where they were all
made to sit down. Then the gendarmes began shooting them until they
had killed nearly all of them. Some who had not been killed by
bullets were then disposed of with knives and bayonets. A few
succeeded in breaking the rope with which they were tied to their
companions and running away, but most of these were pursued and
killed. A few succeeded in getting away, probably not more than two
or three. No charge of any kind had ever been made against any of
these men. They were simply arrested and killed as part of the
general plan to dispose of the Armenian race. Last night several
hundred more men, including both men arrested by the civil
authorities and those enrolled as soldiers, were taken in a
different direction and murdered in a similar manner. The same
thing has been done systematically in the villages. A few weeks ago
about three hundred men were gathered together at Ichme and
Haboosi, two villages four and five hours' distant from here, and
then taken up to the mountains and massacred. There seems to be a
definite plan to dispose of all the Armenians men...The evident
plan of the Government is to give no opportunity for any
educational or religious work to be done here by foreign
missionaries. Some Armenian women will be taken as Moslem wives and
some children will be brought up as Moslem, but none of them will
be allowed to come under foreign influences. The country is to be
purely Moslem and nothing else.

Leslie A. Davis, American Vice Consul in Harput Turkey, in a
report to US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morganthau (11
July 1915) - U.S. National Archives. D.S. Record Group 59, Dec.
File No. 867.4016/122

Greater misery could not be imagined, the dead and the dying
are everywhere...The whole country is one vast slaughterhouse.

Leslie Davis, American Vice Consul in Harput Turkey in The
Slaughterhouse Province

I have the honor to further supplement my reports of June 30th
and July 11th (File No. 840.1) in regard to the expulsion of the
Armenians from this region, or to speak more clearly, the wholesale
massacre of these Armenians, as follows — Any doubt that
may have been expressed in previous reports as to the Government's
intention in sending away the Armenians have been removed and any
hope that may have been expressed as to the possibility of some of
them surviving has been destroyed. It has been no secret that the
plan was to destroy the Armenian race as a race, but the methods
have been more cold-blooded and barbarous, if not more effective,
than I had first supposed. It was apparent that very few
would ever survive the journey from here to Urfa or to any other
place at this season of the year. As a matter of fact, it has been
quite unnecessary to consider the difficulties of such a journey.
It seems to be fully established now that practically all who have
been sent away from here have been deliberately shot or otherwise
killed within one or two days after their departure. This work has
not all been done by bands of Kurds but has for the most part been
that of gendarmes who accompanied the people from here or the
companies of armed "cetes" (convicts) who have been released from
prison for the purpose of murdering the Armenian exiles. It has
been repeatedly reported, and I think there is no doubt about the
truth of these reports, that not a single man who has been sent
away has been spared. Many of the women and children have been
deliberately killed at the same time. A few of the more attractive
women have been carried off to adorn the harems of some of the
Kurdish chieftains and of some of the gendarmes. Some of the older
women and children have been allowed to wander along, accompanied
by gendarmes, with the certainty that all of them will soon perish
from hunger, sickness and exhaustion. I do not believe there has
ever been a massacre in the history of the world so general and
thorough as that which is now being perpetrated in this region or
that a more fiendish, diabolical scheme has ever been conceived by
the mind of man. What the order is officially and nominally to
exile the Armenians from these Vilayets may mislead the world for a
while, but the measure is nothing but a massacre of the most
atrocious nature. It would be that even if all the people had been
allowed to perish on the road. As the greater part of them,
however, have been actually murdered as as there is no doubt that
this was done by the order of the Government, there can be no
pretense that the measure is anything else but a general massacre.
In all, probably a third of the population of this region is gone.
The most remarkable feature of the situation is the helplessness of
the Armenians and the total lack of resistance on their part. With
two or three insignificant exceptions, there has not been a blow
struck by any of them. I have been told that two or three gendarmes
have been killed in the villages, but probably not a half a dozen
in all. It did not seem possible that such an order could be
carried out without more or less violence. One would think that
some would have chosen death here, knowing that it awaited them a
few hours after their departure, and many talked that way, but when
the time has come all have started without making any resistance.
This has been due, partially, of course, to the lack of sprit in
the Armenian race, but it is due very largely also to the clever
way in which the scheme has been carried out. Everything was
apparently planned months ago. Then, when practically all the
Armenian men had been gotten out of the way it was announced that
all Armenians must be deported. Effective resistance to such an
order was impossible. The whole scheme was planned so cleverly that
the police and gendarmes are able to carry it out with no risk at
all to themselves. A few thousand men have thus been able to
dispose of 15,000 or 20,000 Armenians from this immediate locality.
It appears that the same system has been followed in other parts of
this Vilayet and in other Vilayets. It is impossible to say how
many Armenians have been killed but it is estimated that the number
as not far from a million. Greater misery could not be imagined. It
was bad enough before when there were several thousand all in a
most wretched condition. Now, when only the worst of them are left
behind, the scene beggars all description. The dead and dying are
everywhere. Each day there are many deaths and these will continue
until all are gone. Dead bodies are to be seen there at any time.
One sees dead bodies now in all directions and on every
road... The whole country as one vast charnel house, or, more
correctly speaking, slaughterhouse. When one sees men and
women seventy or even eighty years old, lame, blind and sick,
innocent women and children and helpless babies sent away to be
killed or die and actually sees them dead or dying all around, it
is impossible to conceive of any justification that can be urged
for a measure so severe.

Leslie A. Davis, American Vice Consul in Harput Turkey, in a
report to US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morganthau (24
July 1915) - U.S. National Archives. D.S. Record Group 59, Dec.
File No. 867.4016/269

If the Turkish Government were asked the reasons for which the
Armenian men, women, and children were killed, and their honor and
property placed at any man's mercy, they would reply that this
people have murdered Moslems in the Vilayet of Van, and that there
have been found in their possession prohibited arms, explosive
bombs, and indications of steps towards the formation of an
Armenian state, such as flags and the like, all pointing to the
fact that this race has not turned from its evil ways, but on the
first opportunity will kill the Moslems, rise in revolt, and invoke
the help of Russia, the enemy of Turkey, against its rulers. That
is what the Turkish government would say. I have followed the
matter from its source. I have inquired from inhabitants and
officials of Van, who were in Diarbekir, whether any Moslem had
been killed by Armenians in the town of Van, or in the district of
the Vilayet. They answered in the negative, saying that the
Government had ordered the population to quit the town before the
arrival of the Russians and before anyone was killed but that the
Armenians had been summoned to give up their arms and had done so,
dreading an attack by the Kurds, and dreading the government also;
the government had further demanded that the principal notables and
leading men should be given up to them as hostages, but the
Armenians had not complied. All this took place during the approach
of the Russians towards the city of Van. As to the adjacent
districts, the authorities collected the Armenians and drove them
into the interior, where they were all slaughtered, no Government
official or private man, Turk or Kurd, having been killed. As
regards Diarbekir, you have read the whole story in this book, and
no insignificant event took place there, let alone murders or
breaches of the peace, which could lead the Turkish Government to
deal with the Armenians in this atrocious manner. At
Constantinople, we hear of no murder or other unlawful act
committed by the Armenians, except the unauthenticated story about
the twenty activists to which I have already referred. They have
not done the least wrong in the Vilayets of Kharpout, Trebizond,
Sivas, Adana, or Bitlis, nor in the province of Moush. I have
related the episode at Zeitoun, which was unimportant, and that at
Urfa, where they acted in self defense, seeing what had befallen
their people, and preferring death to surrender. As to
their preparations, the flags, bombs and the like, even assuming
there to be some truth in the statement, it does not justify the
annihilation of the whole people, men and women, old men and
children, in a way which revolts all humanity and more especially
Islam and the whole body of Moslems, as those unacquainted with the
true facts might impute these deeds to Mohammedan
fanaticism.

Fa'iz El-Ghusein, in Martyred Armenia,
as translated from the original Arabic by C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd.,
England, (1917) pages 50-61.

We knew that the Armenians have committed no act justifying the
Turks in inflicting on them this horrible retribution,
un-precedented even in the dark ages. What, then, was the reason
which impelled the Turkish Government to kill off a whole people of
whom they used to say that they were their brothers in patriotism,
the principal factor in bringing about the downfall of the despotic
rule of Abdul-Hamid and the introduction of the constitution, loyal
to the empire, and fighting side by side with the Turks in the
Balkan War? The Turks sanctioned and approved the institution of
Armenian political societies, which they did not do in the case of
other nationalities. It is that, previous to the proclamation of
the Constitution, the Unionists [Young Turks] hated despotic rule,
they preached equality, and inspired the people with hatred of the
despotism of Abdul-Hamid. But as soon as they had themselves seized
the reins of authority, and tasted the sweets of power, they found
that despotism was the best means to confirm themselves in ease and
property, and to limit to the Turks alone the rule over the Ottoman
peoples. On considering these peoples, they found that the Armenian
race was the only one which would resent their despotism, and fight
against it as they previously fought against Abdul-Hamid.
Annihilation seemed to be the sole means of deliverance;
they found their opportunity in a time of war, and they proceeded
to this atrocious deed, which they carried out with every
circumstance of brutality — a deed which is contrary to the law of
Islam...

Fa'iz El-Ghusein, in Martyred Armenia, as translated
from the original Arabic by C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd., England,
(1917) pages 62-64.

Genocide often occurs during war, for example, the
Armenian genocide during WWI, and the Holocaust of Jews and Gypsies
during WWII, but should not be confused with the civilian war dead.
This is a common trick of genocide deniers, to compare figures of
one and the other, for example, the Muslim war dead during the
First World War and Armenian victims of genocide. War does not
cause genocide. It masks it, justifies the release of aggression
and cruelty, provides a cover for the perpetrators, immunity from
sanctions, and enables them to deny their responsibility by blaming
the victims. Some preconditions of genocide can be
illustrated by examining the Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire...The first precondition is exclusion of the victim
from the universe of obligation of the dominant group.
This is reinforced by an ideology of exclusion, defining the victim
as an alien or enemy, such as the Aryan myth and the Pan-Turanian
myth. Such groups are viewed by the dominant group as people who do
not belong, to whom nothing is owed, who do not have to be
accounted for, and to whom one need not account. Most often in the
twentieth century such ideologies are rationalizations of the aim
of an elite to create a so-called pure or homogeneous ethnic state
— one people, one state. Everyone who does not fit in must be
eliminated, either by expulsion or genocide. Second, there is a
problem attributed to the victim or an opportunity seemed to be
impeded by the victims. The victims may be seen as a real or
symbolic threat. Sometimes the victims rebel, have rebelled, or do
not accept their place, and the perpetrators choose to eliminate
them rather than share power with them. And theOttoman Empire,
Bosnia, and Kosovo are certainly examples of this. Finally, there's
a calculus on the part of the perpetrators that they can get away
with it. War generally provides immunity from oversight and
intervention by hostile powers. Further, major powers have
committed genocide or overlooked genocides and genocidal massacres
by their clients in the past. The knowledge by the genocidaires
that there have been no sanctions against previous uses of genocide
reinforces their readiness to commit genocide. It is clear that the
Ittihadist faction that took control of the Ottoman Empire in 1912
was the organizer of the Armenian genocide in 1915. The First World
War presented the ruling triumvirate with an opportunity, as Djemal Pasha put it, to "free ourselves
through the world war from all conventions which meant so many
attacks on our independence." He went on to say that "We
had determined on radical reform... " But he does not say that the
"radical reform" was to eliminate the Armenian problem by
eliminating the Armenians. That that was their plan was
confirmed at the time by Lord Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, Ambassador
Morgenthau, and German officials who were there as allies of the
Ottoman government. Yet the Armenian genocide was more than a
precedent for what could be done in World War II. It was a
model of what could be done with impunity that resonated in the
memories of German soldiers, officials and civilians who took part
in the First World War...the success of any genocide depends not
only on the power of the genocidaire and the response of the
bystanders in the state in which it occurs but also on the response
of other states. For several decades Turkey and Turkish state
funded organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere have denied that
there was an Armenian genocide. Not only were Armenians' rights to
restitution denied, their memories were publicly denied.

Helen Fein, Director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide
and an Associate of the Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University in Looking Backward: The Armenian Genocide, the
Holocaust, And Responses to Genocide Yesterday and Today given
at the Symposium on Genocide, 20th Century Genocide: Memory,
Denial and Accountability (7 April 2000)

For the better part of six months, from April to October 1915,
practically all the highways in Asia Minor were crowded with these
unearthly bands of exiles. As far as can be ascertained, about
1,200,000 people started on this journey to the Syrian desert....
The gendarmes whom the government had sent, supposedly to protect
the exiles, in a very few hours became their tormentors. They
followed their charges with fixed bayonets, prodding any one who
showed any tendency to slacken the pace. . . . They even prodded
pregnant women with bayonets.... Detachements of gendarmes would go
ahead notifying the Kurdish tribes that their victims were
approaching and Turkish peasants were also informed that their long
waited opportunity had arrived. The Government even opened the
prisons and set free the convicts, on the understanding that they
should behave like good Moslems to the approaching Armenians. Thus
every caravan had a continuous battle for existence with several
classes of enemies. . . . The men who might have defended these
wayfarers had nearly all been killed or forced into the army as
workmen, and the exiles themselves had been systematically deprived
of all weapons before the journey began.

Arthur Frothingham, in Handbook of War Facts and Peace
Problems (1919)

I left here on the sixteenth of September, 1915, for Aleppo. I
first saw the Armenians at Afion Karahissar where there was a big
encampment — probably of ten thousand people...and their condition
was deplorable. The next place where there was a large encampment
was at Osmanieh, where there was said to be about fifty thousand;
their condition was terrible. From Osmanieh, I traveled by carriage
to Rajo and passed thousands of Armenians en route to Aleppo. They
were going in ox-carts, on horseback, donkeys and on foot, the most
of them children, women and old men. I spoke to several of these
people, some of whom had been educated in the American Mission
Schools. They told me that they had traveled for two months. They
were without money and food and several expressed their wish that
they could die rather than go on and endure the sufferings that
they were undergoing. From Kadma on to Aleppo I witnessed the worst
sights of the whole trip. Here the people began to play out in the
intense heat and no water...The destination of all these Armenians
is Aleppo. Here they are kept crowded in all available vacant
houses, khans, Armenian churches, courtyards and open lots. Their
condition in Aleppo is beyond description. I personally visited
several of the places where they were kept and found them starving
and dying by the hundreds every day...there are hundreds dying
daily in Aleppo from starvation and the result of the brutal
treatment and exposure that they have undergone on the journey from
their native places...In Damascus I found conditions practically
the same as in Aleppo; and here hundreds are dying every day. From
Damascus, they are sent still farther south into the Hauran, where
their fate is unknown. Several Turks, whom I interviewed,
told me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race,
and in no instance did I see, any Moslem giving alms to Armenians,
it being considered a criminal offence for any one to aid
them. All along the road I met thousands of these
unfortunate exiles still coming into Aleppo. The sights I witnessed
on this trip were more pitiful than those I had seen on my trip to
Aleppo. There seems to be no end to the caravan which moves over
the mountain ridge from Bozanti south; throughout the day from
sunrise to sunset, the road as far as one can see is crowded with
these exiles. There are very few young men in these caravans, the
majority are women and children, accompanied by a few old men over
fifty years of age. Many of these people go without bread for days,
and they become emaciated beyond description. I saw several fall
from starvation, and only at certain places along this road is
there water. Many die of thirst. None of these people have any idea
where they are going or why they are being exiled. They go day
after day along the road with the hope that they may somewhere
reach a place where they may be allowed to rest. There seems to be
no cessation of the stream of these Armenians pouring down from the
North, Angora and the region around the Black Sea. Their condition
grows worse every day. The sights that I saw on my return trip were
worse than those on my trip going, and now that the cold weather
and winter rains are setting in, deaths are more numerous.

Walter M. Geddes, American businessman and traveller
(1915)

I, as an ethnically Turkish citizen, am not guilty, but am
responsible for what happened to the Armenians in 1915. I did an
analysis of the Deputies of the first National Assembly, I have
found enough documentation that implicates about 25-30% of the
Deputies of having participated in the massacres against the
Armenians... Not only was there no accountability and no punishment
for those who committed crimes against the Armenians, but many of
the perpetrators unfortunately then became leaders of the Turkish
Republic.

Dr. Fatma Müge Göçek, Associate Professor of Sociology at the
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, in Turkey, the European Union
and the Armenian Question — a presention given before the
International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights (2 December
2005)

The population is showing true Moslem resignation in the way it
is bearing the existing situation — the ruin and desolation of
individuals and community, the holocaust of all and everything for
a war which no one desired, but which was forced upon them by Enver Pasha, and which will lead to the
ruin and dismemberment of all that still remains of the Ottoman
Empire. The Germans and the "Committee of Union and Progress" are
hated and detested by all...for the Germans and the Committee
constitute the one genuine, solid organisation at present existing
in Turkey — a masterly and most rigorous organisation, which does
not hesitate to use any weapon whatever; an organisation of
audacity, of terror, and of mysterious, ferocious revenge. . .
As for the Armenians, they were treated differently in the
different vilayets. They were suspect and spied upon everywhere,
but they suffered a real extermination, worse than massacre, in the
so-called 'Armenian Vilayets.' from the 24th June onwards, the
Armenians were all "interned" — that is, ejected by force from
their various residences and despatched under the guard of the
gendarmerie to distant, unknown destinations, which for a few will
mean the interior of Mesopotamia, but for four-fifths of them has
meant already a death accompanied by unheard-of cruelties.
The official proclamation of internment came from Constantinople.
It is the work of the Central Government and the "Committee of
Union and Progress." The local authorities, and indeed the
Moslem population in general, tried to resist, to mitigate it, to
make omissions, to hush it up. But the orders of the Central
Government were categorically confirmed, and all were compelled to
resign themselves and obey. It was a real extermination and
slaughter of the innocents, an unheard-of thing, a black page
stained with the flagrant violation of the most sacred rights of
humanity... There were about 14,000 Armenians at Trebizond —
Gregorians, Catholics, and Protestants. They had never caused
disorders or given occasion for collective measures of police. When
I left Trebizond, not a hundred of them remained. ...the
city in a state of siege, guarded at every point by 15,000 troops
in complete war equipment, by thousands of police agents by bands
of volunteers and by the members of the "Committee of Union and
Progress" ; the lamentations, the tears, the abandonments, the
imprecations, the many suicides, the instantaneous deaths from
sheer terror, the sudden unhingeing of men's reason, the
conflagrations, the shooting of victims in the city, the ruthless
searches through the houses and in the countryside; the hundreds of
corpses found every day along the exile road; the young women
converted by force to Islam or exiled like the rest; the children
torn away from their families or from the Christian schools, and
handed over by force to Moslem families, or else placed by hundreds
on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and
drowned in the Black Sea and the River Deyirmen Deré — these are my
last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, memories which still, at a
month's distance, torment my soul and almost drive me frantic. If
they knew all the things that I know, all that I have had to see
with my eyes and hear with my ears, all Christian powers that are
still neutral would be impelled to rise up against Turkey and cry
anathema against her inhuman Government and her ferocious
"Committee of Union and Progress," and they would extend the
responsibility to Turkey's Allies, who tolerate or even shield with
their strong arm these execrable crimes, which have not their equal
in history, either modern or ancient. Shame, horror and disgrace!

Interview of G. Gorrini, former italian Consul-General at
Trebizond, published in the journal Il Messaggero of Rome,
on August 25 1915

The first implementation of the CUP regime's goal of
creating a homogeneous nation was the elimination of the Armenians
from Anatolia in 1915...It was a prerequisite for
homogenisation in the name of modernisation that both internal and
external conditions served to justify their policies under the
rhetoric of state security and interests.

Ayla Gul, in Imagining the Turkish nation through
'othering' Armenians in Nations and Nationalism 11
(1), 2005, p130. (Gul is an ethically Turkish professor in the
International Relations Department of the London School of
Economics and Political Science)

Massacres and deportations were organized in the spring of
1915, under a definite system, the soldiers going from town to
town. Young men were first summoned to the government building in
each village and then marched out and killed. The women, the old
men and the children were, after a few days, deported to what Talaat Pasha called "Agricultural
Colonies," from the high, breeze-swept plateaus of Armenia to the
malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands of Syria and
Arabia. The dead, from this wholesale attempt on the race,
are variously estimated at from five hundred thousand to a million,
the usual figure being about eight hundred thousand. Driven on foot
under a hot sun, robbed of their clothing and such petty articles
as they carried, prodded by bayonets if they lagged, starvation,
typhus, and dysentery left thousands dead by the trail
side.

James Harbord, in the Harbord Commision report (June 1920)

Turkey initiated a policy of annihialation against the
Armenians.

Paul von Hindenburg, German Field
Marshall in the Ottoman Empire during WWI in From My Life,
Leipzig, (1934) p169

We must already be thinking of resettlement of millions of men
from Germany and Europe. Migrations of people have always taken
place. Are we really going to remain a nation of have-nots forever?
We have the capacity to rouse and lead the masses against this
situation. We intend to introduce a great resettlement policy; In
1923 little Greece could resettle a million men. Think of
the biblical deportations and the massacres of the Middle Ages and
remember the extermination of the Armenians.

Adolph Hitler in an interview with Richard
Breiting that apeared in the German daily newspaper Leipziger
Neueste Nachrichten (4 May 1931)

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the
Armenians?

Adolf Hitler
(22 August 1939) for discussion of the quote see Armenian quote; note that Hitler's
quote was relating to his plans regarding his intention to attack
Poland and kill masses of Poles and replace them with Germans as he
saw the Ottomans had sucessfully done in the previous World War
without adverse consequences or punishment.

The systematic butchery of the uprooted and deported
Armenians have assumed such a scope...it was not only tolerated but
openly promoted by the government. It meant the
extermination of the Armenians. Despite government
assurances to the contrary, everything points to the goal of the
destruction of the Armenian people.

It should be borne in mind, however, that it was not until
after the declaration of the constitution that the idea "Turkey for
the Turks" took definite shape and developed into the scheme of
accomplishing its purpose by the final extinction of all the
Christian populations of that blood-soaked land...

George Horton in The Blight of
Asia (1926). Horton was the American General Consul in Smyrna
from 1911 until 1917, then again after the war until 1922 - and was
a direct eyewitness to the city's destruction and the massacreing
of the city's Greeks and Armenians by the forces of Kemal
Ataturk

The Turk massacres when he has orders from headquarters and
desists on the second when commanded by the same authority to stop.

The extermination of the Christians of Turkey was an
organized butchery, carried out on a great scale... This
part of the story would not be complete if I passed over in silence
the systematic extermination... of the Greeks and Armenians of the
Pontus. The flourishing communities of Amasia, Caesaria,
Trebizonde, Chaldes, Rhodopolis, Colonia, centers of Greek
civilization for many hundreds of years have been practically
annihilated in a persistent campaign of massacre, hanging,
deportation, fire and rape. The victims amount to hundreds
of thousands, bringing the sum total of exterminated Armenians and
Greeks in the whole of the old Roman province of Asia up to the
grand total of one million, five hundred thousand.

The last act in the fearful drama of the extermination of
Christianity in the Byzantine Empire was the burning of Smyrna by
the troops of Mustapha Khemal. The murder of the Armenian
race had been practically consummated during the years 1915-1916,
and the prosperous and populous Greek colonies, with the exception
of Smyrna itself, had been ferociously destroyed.

[After the Balkan wars of 1913] Turkism, as a racialised
articulation of citizenship, emerged as the dominant discourse of
the period. ...Turkism is defined here as...Turkishness as the
determinative identity of the citizens of the empire. (In) March
1913, the Turkish Force Committee was founded. It explicitly
claimed to cultivate the new Turkish citizens...the founders argued
(that)from now on, the empire should be left to the real owners,
the Turkish race. What was different from the Turkism that existed
before the Balkan Wars was the idea that Turkism not only needed to
become dominant, but it had to become so in an urgent manner. This
sense of urgency combined with the dominance Turkism now enjoyed
led Turkism to materialise into various events and acts in a very
short period of time. Turkism...was manifest in...the
displacement and elimination of Armenian citizens of the Ottoman
Empire. The institutionalisation of Turkism meant the
homogenisation of the citizenship in the empire. After the
Balkan Wars, Armenians, or any other element in the empire other
than the Turks, were not peoples who had to be educated, governed
and Ottomanised but were enemies to be executed urgently or in some
distant future. With Turkism, Armenians were Armenians. Race could
not be changed. Turkism desired a racially homogeneous citizenry; a
nation acquiring its sovereignty from its racial basis. In 1913,
the CUP decided to establish youth clubs all around the empire.
They were called the Tu¨rk Gu¨cu¨ Cemiyetleri (Societies of Turkish
Power). The motto of the societies was: 'the force of the Turk is
always enough for everything' ...their aim was to serve the Turkish
race and avoid its decline by...'gathering the Turks under one roof
and protecting them from hazardous influences' The interesting
point about the societies is that the statements produced within
them construct the decline in the social and political functions of
the race as inscribed into the bodies of the Turks. The Turks were
already healthy and strong. Other races in the empire changed this
condition... by living at the expense of the Turkish race... the
other races were never as strong and healthy as the Turks.
Therefore the hybridity of the population of the empire worsened
the condition of the Turks. It was time again to go back to the
purity of the origins of the Turkish race. That is why
other races had to be eliminated. Turkism constructed an imminent
threat posed by the Armenians and took action to exterminate that
threat. Turkism operated as state racism.Enver Pasha, by then the head of the
CUP, argued that by expelling the Armenians from the empire, the
Turks in the Ottoman Empire would once again be healthy and clean.
Otherwise the Turks would slowly cease to exist, just as an
unhealthy person approaches death when not taken care of. In other
words, the existence of the Turkish race depended on eliminating
the unclean elements including other races, in this case the
Armenians. Turkism and the Armenian tragedy in this sense can be
seen as a function of the biological racism. Turkism, as racialised
citizenship, negated the life of Armenian citizens in the empire.

Bora Isyar, Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto,
Canada in The origins of Turkish Republican citizenship: the
birth of race in Nations and Nationalism 11 (3), 2005,
343–360

Hundreds of individual cases of persecution such as
blackmailing, beating, imprisoning, etc., could be stated but which
would lend no further weight to the general statement of outrages
that are being practiced daily upon a defenseless and inoffensive
people that demand nothing more than to be given a chance to eke
out at best a miserable existence. The government has been appealed
to by various prominent people and even by those in authority to
put an end to these conditions, under the representations that is
can only lead to the greatest blame and reproach, but all to no
avail. It is without doubt a carefully planned scheme to
thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.

J. B. Jackson, American Consul General at Aleppo, June 5, 1915
US State Department Record Group 59, 867.4016/77

In the Spring of 1915, when the snow was beginning to
melt on the Armenian plateau, the government in Constantinople
began work on the systematic annihilation of Armenians.
The Armenians were driven to the South, avoiding routes from where
Armenians were already cleansed. The town of Urfa, nearby the
Syrian desert, which was the terminus for the driven Armenians, was
the last one to be cleansed of Armenians. By the Summer of 1916,
the Armenian community had been removed and fragmented. The largest
nucleus [of Armenians] outside Constantinople, consisted of
laborers found outside Adana, working on the Baghdad railroad.
There were no Armenian villages left. The history of the Armenian
genocide is the history of Armenian women and urchins. The men were
murdered right at the start. From primary sources, both Ottoman and
other, it appears that in the East where a war was being fought
with Russia, the Armenians were murdered on the spot. Elsewhere,
they were deported, whereby their houses were not destroyed but
confiscated. Their personal possessions, such as money and jewelry
were looted from them. For the reason for the implementation of the
genocide, you should ask Talaat. Both
pan-Turkism and Islamic fervor existed well before the genocide.
the provocation thesis, which states that Armenian were the fifth
column and would have turned on the Turks the moment the Russians
advanced, is a concoction that was hatched at the German embassy in
Constantinople in May 1915. The Ottoman Empire was extensively
centralized. A good bureaucracy held it all together. The
telegraphic system of communication was exemplary. Special military
units were instituted for the purpose of carrying out the genocide.
No one was allowed to murder Armenians without the consent of these
military units. Those who disregarded the rules were dealt
severely.

Dr. Hilmar Kaiser, PhD, European Institute, Florence, historian
of Ottoman social and economic history and Armenian genocide
resercher who has worked directly with the Ottoman Archives; from
an interview with Dirk van Delft, NRC Handelsblad Page 51
- Amsterdam (27 May 2000)

The Armenian genocide is the Ottoman government's
answer to the Armenian Question: Deportations can only be analyzed
in terms of expropriation. It was grand theft. It was the surgical
separation of Armenians from their movable and immovable
property. The Ottoman government was very careful of not
wasting any assets while being not concerned about the fate of the
Armenians. To make the expropriation permanent, you have to replace
the Armenians. The expropriation was part of a settlement program;
this process created a surplus population and this surplus
population was taken care of. The Armenians were mathematically a
surplus population. Killing or, in the case of children and women,
assimilating them solved that problem. What took place was
genocide, not massacres. I use the word `genocide' because it
adequately describes the phenomenon. It's the only term we have
that describes it. If one day we have a better word, fine. The
English, German, and Turkish languages have only one word to
describe. That this has a negative consequence on the Turkish
government is something I can't change; I can't change history. I'm
not prepared to haggle over it. If a Turkish scholar says it too
politicized and he or she doesn't want to use the word, then let
him/her take a different subject. If you want to be part of this
debate, apply proper terminology and if you don't want to do it,
you aren't a scholar.

Dr. Hilmar Kaiser, in interview with Khatchig Mouradian (24
September 2005) published in Aztag Daily Newspaper

The destruction of the Armenians was undertaken on a
massive scale...This policy of extermination will for a long time
stain the name of Turkey.

In Turkey, more than 1,200,000 Armenians were put to death for
no other reason than they were Christians ... After the end of the
war, some 150 Turkish war criminals were arrested and interned by
the British Government on the island of Malta. The Armenians sent a
delegation to the peace conference in Versailles. They were
demanding justice. Then one day, the delegation read in the
newspapers that all Turkish war criminals were released. I was
shocked. A nation was killed and the guilty persons were set free.
Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing
of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single
individual? I identified myself more and more with the sufferings
of the victims, whose numbers grew, as I continued my study of
history. I understood that the function of memory is not only to
register past events, but to stimulate human conscience. Soon
contemporary examples of genocide followed, such as the slaughter
of the Armenians in 1915. It became clear to me that the diversity
of nations, religious groups and races is essential to civilization
because every one of those groups has a mission to fulfill and a
contribution to make in terms of culture.... I decided to become a
lawyer and work for the outlawing of Genocide and for its
prevention through the cooperation of nations. A bold plan was
formulated in my mind. This consisted [of] obtaining the
ratification by Turkey [of the proposed UN Convention on Genocide
Ed.] among the first twenty founding nations. This would be an
atonement for [the] genocide of the Armenians. But how could this
be achieved? . . . The Turks are proud of their republican form of
government and of progressive concepts, which helped them in
replacing the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The genocide convention
must be put within the framework of social and international
progress. I knew however that in this conversation both sides will
have to avoid speaking about one thing, although it would be
constantly in their minds: the Armenians.

Raphael Lemkin, Holocaust refugee and
lawyer who created the word "genocide" in part to describe the
horrors of the official Ottoman government policy and actions to
exterminate the Armenian people of Anatolia, from his private
papers, with permission of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division,
the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden
Foundations.

The evidence...from German, Austrian and Turkish
sources in my view leads inescapably to the conclusion that the
extermination of the Armenians was actually planned by a clique
within the Young Turk leadership and executed by the sinister
Special Organization [Teshkilati Mahsusa] of the army.

Dominic Lieven in Empire (2001) Yale University Press.
Lieven is a well known British historian, a Pofessor of History at
the London School of Economics and former Kennedy Scholar at
Harvard University.

The Turks have embarked upon the total extermination of
the Armenians in Transcaucasia, also (May 1918)... On the
basisof all reports and news comming to me here in Tbilissi
[Georgia] there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks
systematically are aiming at the... extermination of the few
hundred thousand Armenians whom they have left alive until now.

Otto von Lossow, Major General,
German Military Plenipotentiary in Turkey and German Representative
at Batum Conference in May, 1918 - 11 July 1918 - German Foreign
Ministry Archives

The decision to expel the woman, children and old men,
was the result of a hatred against the Armenians, and involved a
wild objective on the part of the Turkish government to obliterate
this race... the massive arrests of the men were carried
out not only in the near of the front but throughout the empire...
and in the corridors of the Turkish Ministry of War one heard
people tell with cynical grins the story of how all these thousands
died a natural death or how they were victims of accidents — as
registered in official records...

George Mayer, Prof. Dr. Colonel, Deputy Chief in the Department
of Heath of the Turkish Army

The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were the
quintessential instances of genocide in the modern era.
Three reasons may be cited for this claim. First, there were
instances of what we shall call "total genocide" or what the United
Nations has called "genocide-in-whole" to distinguish such
instances from massacre and "genocide-in-part." Both catastophes
were the products of state-initiated policies whose intended and
actual results were the elimination of the Armenian community from
the Ottoman Empire and of the Jewish community from most of Europe,
respectively. Second, both victimized groups were ethnoreligious
communal minorities that had been partially integrated and
assimilated into the larger society. Their destruction was not only
a war against foreign strangers, it was a mass murder that
commenced with an attack on an internal domestic segment of the
state's own society. The genocide of the Armenians should be
understood not as a response to "Armenian provocations" but as a
stage in the Turkish revolution, which as a reaction to the
continuing disintegration of the empire settled on a narrow
nationalism and excluded Armenians from the moral universe of the
state. It should be obvious from the overwhelming evidence
that exists in the state archives of major powers (the above being
but a small representative sample) that the 1915 genocide of the
Armenians was premeditated and the isolated cases of armed
resistance by the Armenians were deliberately provoked by the
Turkish govenrment so as to exploit it as justification for a
general campaign of race extermination. That being so,
bringing up the much discredited myth of Armenian disloyalty in the
context of the 1915 Armenian Genocide is as offensive to the
victims as well as to well-informed non-Armenians as bringing up
the Nazi rationalization of an alleged "international Jewish
conspiracy" would be in the context of the Nazi Holocaust. Because
both the Armenians under Ottoman rule and the Jews in
Nazi-occupied Europe perished not for something they did or failed
to do, but for who they were.

Professor Robert Melson, Holocaust survivor and genocide
scholar in Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the
Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (1992) University of
Chicago Press

In a realisation of their plan to resolve the Armenian Question by
destroying the Armenian race, the Turkish Government is not stopped
neither by our representatives, nor by the public opinion of the
west. ~ Paul Wolff Metternich

In a realisation of their plan to resolve the Armenian
Question by destroying the Armenian race, the Turkish Government is
not stopped neither by our representatives, nor by the public
opinion of the west.

The destruction of the Armenian race in 1915 involved
certain difficulties that had not impeded the operations of the
Turks in the massacres of 1895 and other years. In these
earlier periods the Armenian men had possessed little power or
means of resistance. In those days Armenians had not been permitted
to have military training, to serve in the Turkish army, or to
possess arms. As I have already said, these discriminations were
withdrawn when the revolutionists obtained the upper hand in 1908.
Not only were the Christians now permitted to bear arms, but the
authorities, in the full flush of their enthusiasm for freedom and
equality, encouraged them to do so. In the early part of 1915,
therefore, every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who
had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles,
pistols, and other weapons of defense. The operations at Van once
more disclosed that these men could use their weapons to good
advantage. It was thus apparent that an Armenian massacre this time
would generally assume more the character of warfare than those
wholesale butcheries of defenseless men and women which the Turks
had always found so congenial. If this plan of murdering a race
were to succeed, two preliminary steps would therefore have to be
taken: it would be necessary to render all Armenian soldiers
powerless and to deprive of their arms the Armenians in every city
and town. Before Armenia could be slaughtered, Armenia must
be made defenseless. In the early part of 1915, the Armenian
soldiers in the Turkish army were reduced to a new status. Up to
that time most of them had been combatants, but now they were all
stripped of their arms and transformed into workmen. ...
In almost all cases the procedure was the same. Here and there
squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of
four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from
the village. Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air,
and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly
return to camp. Those sent to bury the bodies would find them
almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen
all their clothes. In cases that came to my attention, the
murderers had added a refinement to their victims' sufferings by
compelling them to dig their graves before being shot. ... Dreadful
as were these massacres of unarmed soldiers, they were mercy and
justice themselves when compared with the treatment which was now
visited upon those Armenians who were suspected of concealing arms.
Naturally the Christians became alarmed when placards were posted
in the villages and cities ordering everybody to bring their arms
to headquarters. Although this order applied to all citizens, the
Armenians well understood what the result would be, should they be
left defenseless while their Moslem neighbours were permitted to
retain their arms. In many cases, however, the persecuted
people patiently obeyed the command; and then the Turkish officials
almost joyfully seized their rifles as evidence that a "revolution"
was being planned and threw their victims into prison on a charge
of treason. Thousands failed to deliver arms simply because they
had none to deliver, while an even greater number tenaciously
refused to give them up, not because they were plotting an
uprising, but because they proposed to defend their own lives and
their women's honour against the outrages which they knew were
being planned. The punishment inflicted upon these recalcitrants
forms one of the most hideous chapters of modern history.
... Nothing was sacred to the Turkish gendarmes; under the plea of
searching for hidden arms, they ransacked churches, treated the
altars and sacred utensils with the utmost indignity, and even held
mock ceremonies in imitation of the Christian sacraments. They
would beat the priests into insensibility, under the pretense that
they were the centres of sedition. When they could discover no
weapons in the churches, they would sometimes arm the bishops and
priests with guns, pistols, and swords, then try them before
courts-martial for possessing weapons against the law, and march
them in this condition through the streets, merely to arouse the
fanatical wrath of the mobs. As a preliminary to the searches
everywhere, the strong men of the villages and towns were arrested
and taken to prison. Their tormentors here would exercise the most
diabolical ingenuity in their attempt to make their victims declare
themselves to be "revolutionists" and to tell the hiding places of
their arms. A common practice was to place the prisoner in a room,
with two Turks stationed at each end and each side. The examination
would then begin with the bastinado. This is a form of torture not
uncommon in the Orient; it consists of beating the soles of the
feet with a thin rod. At first the pain is not marked; but as the
process goes slowly on, it develops into the most terrible agony,
the feet swell and burst, and not infrequently, after being
submitted to this treatment, they have to be amputated. ... In
thousands of cases the Armenians endured these agonies and refused
to surrender their arms simply because they had none to surrender.
However, they could not persuade their tormentors that this was the
case. It therefore became customary, when news was received that
the searchers were approaching, for Armenians to purchase arms from
their Turkish neighbours so that they might be able to give them up
and escape these frightful punishments.

Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians
is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it
appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under
a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.

U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morganthau, in a
confidential dispatch to the U.S. Secretary of State (16 July
1915); United States Official records on the Armenian Genocide
1915-1917, pp. 55, document NA/RG59/867.4016/76

The Sultan's proclamation [of war] was an official public
document, and dealt with the proposed Holy War [Jihad] only in a
general way, but about this same time a secret pamphlet appeared
which gave instructions to the faithful in more specific terms...It
was a lengthy document full of quotations from the Koran, and its
stile was frenzied in its appeal to racial and religious hatred. It
described a detailed plan of operations for the assassination and
extermination of all Christians except those of German nationality.

This attempt of the Armenians to defend themselves against the
Turkish attack in Van was promptly misrepresented in a communique'
which was sent by Enver Pasha and the
Turkish Government to Berlin, and thence spread all over the world,
as an attack by bands of Armenian insurrectionists who, in the rear
of the Turkish army had fallen prey upon the Muhammedan population.
Out of 180,000 Moslems in the Vilayet of Van only 30,000 had
succeeded in escaping! In a later report issued by the Turkish
embassy in Berlin on October 1, 1915, the story was further
embellished: "No fewer than 180,000 Moslems had been killed. It was
not surprising that the Moslems had taken vengeance for this". Some
18 Turks, answering to the number of Armenians they had killed in
Van, had turned into 180,000! This astonishing impudent lie has a
kind of foundation. According to statistics there should be 180,000
Moslems, including 30,000 Turks and 150,000 Kurds, in the Vilayet
of Van. The Turks fled westwards when the Russian army advanced,
while the 150,000 Kurds remained where they were, and were molested
neither by the Russians nor the Armenians

When I returned to Aleppo in September 1915 ... a new phase of
Armenian massacres had begun which aimed at exterminating, root and
branch, the intelligent, industrious, and progressive Armenian
nation. . . . In dilapidated caravansaries (in Aleppo) I found
quantities of dead (many corpses being half-decomposed) and others,
still living among them, who were soon to breathe their last. . . .
masses of half-starved people, the survivors of so-called
'deportation convoys.' I was told, to cover the
extermination of the Armenian nation with a political cloak,
military reasons were being put forward... After I had informed
myself about the facts and had made enquiries on all sides, I came
to the conclusion that all these accusations against the Armenians
were, in fact, based on trifling provocations, which were taken as
an excuse for slaughtering 10,000 innocents for one guilty person,
for the most savage outrages against women and children, and for a
campaign of starvation against the exiles which was intended to
exterminate the whole nation. What we saw with our own
eyes here in Aleppo was really only the last scene in the great
tragedy of the extermination of the Armenians. It was only a minute
fraction of the horrible drama that was being played out
simultaneously in all the other provinces of Turkey. The German
Consul from Mosul related, in my presence, at the German club at
Aleppo that, in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo, he
had seen children's hands lying hacked off in such numbers that one
could have paved the road with them. The Consuls are of opinion
that, so far, probably about one million Armenians have perished in
the massacres of the last few months. Of this number, one must
reckon that at least half are women and children who have either
been murdered or have succumbed to starvation. The Arabs of the
village declared that they had killed these Armenians by the
Government's orders. A newspaper reporter was told by one
of these gentlemen "Certainly we are now punishing many innocent
people as well. But we have to guard ourselves even against those
who may one day become guilty." On such grounds Turkish statesmen
justify the wholesale slaughter of defenceless women and children.
A German Catholic ecclesiastic reported that Enver Pasha declared, in the presence of
Monsignore Dolci, the Papal Envoy at Constantinople, that he would
not rest so long as a single Armenian remained alive. The object of
the deportations is the extermination of the whole Armenian
nation.

Dr. Martin Niepage, in The Horrors of Aleppo; Engl.
Trans. Doran Co., apeared in the New York Times publication Current
History Vol. 5 Nov. 1916 pp 335-37. Dr Niepage was a German
Schoolteacher in Aleppo who directly witnessed and wrote about the
horrors of the Armenian Genocide.

After the massacres of Djarbekir, the tide of carnage and
persecution rolled over the provinces of Adana and Northern Syria
(Zeitun, Urfa, Marrash, etc) which were at the time crowded with
deportees from Central and Northern Anatolia...The provinces of
Van, Bitlis, Djarbekir... were the only ones which suffered
massacres in the true sense of the word. In the remaining vilayets
of the Empire persecution took the form of deportations, which
effected almost the same results as the massacres. there can be no
doubt that the massacres and deportations took place in accordance
with a laid-out plan for which the responsibility lay with the
retrograde party, headed by the Grand Vizier Talat Pasha and the civil
authorities under his orders. They aimed to make an end first of
the Armenians, then of the greeks and other Christians, Ottoman
subjects, in the Empire. We glean ample verification for this from
the masacres of Sairt, Djesiret, and the surrounding districts,
during which perished no less then two hundred thousand Nestorian
Christians, Syrio-Catholics, Jacobites, etc, who had no connection
whatever with the Armenians, and who had always been the Sultan's
loyal subjects. Officially we are forbidden to give the
deportees any ration without a written order signed by the civil
authorities of the province from which they came, along with other
idiocies invented by Talat Pasha in order to kill the poor devils
with starvation.

Rafael de Nogales, in Four Years Beneath the Crescent
pp 116-18 & p 147 - 1926

I learned from them some extremely alarming details regarding
the Armenian situation, which made me comprehend perfectly their
fully justified fear as to the future fate of their small protégés.
I caught sight of the military commander of the place dictating
orders to his officers, while a group of kiatihs or secretaries
deciphered an enormous heap of telegrams. That unaccustomed
activity made me suspect that the storm was about to break. And I
was not mistaken. Next morning, which was the twentieth of April,
1915, we stumbled, near El-Aghlat, upon mutilated Armenian corpses
strewing the length of the road. One hour later we saw numerous
gigantic columns of smoke surge up from the opposite shore of the
lake, indicating the sites where the cities and hamlets of the
provinces of Van were being devoured by flame. Then I understood.
The die was cast. The Armenian "revolution" had begun...April 21.
At dawn I was awakened by the noise of shots and volleys.
The Armenians had attacked the town. Immediately I mounted my horse
and, followed by some armed men, went to see what was happening.
Judge of my amazement to discover that the aggressors had not been
the Armenians, after ail, but the civil authorities
themselves! Supported by the Kurds and the rabble of the
vicinity, they were attacking and sacking the Armenian quarter...,
I succeeded at last, without serious accident, in approaching the
Beledie reis of the town, who was directing the orgy; whereupon I
ordered him to stop the massacre. He astounded me by
replying that he was doing nothing more than carry out an
unequivocal order emanating from the Governor-General of the
province ... to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of
age and over. I, as a soldier, could not prevent the
execution of this decree, which was purely civil in character,
however much I desired. So I ordered the gendarmes to retire, and
waited until the hell was over. At the end of an hour and a half of
butchery there remained of the Armenians of Adil-Javus only seven
survivors... The civil authorities of the Sultan kill noiselessly
and preferably by night, like vampires. Generally they choose as
their victim's sepulchre deep lakes in which there are no
indiscreet currents to bear the corpse to shore, or lonely mountain
caves where dogs and jackals aid in erasing all traces of their
crime. Among them I noticed some Kurds belonging to a group of
several hundred which, on the following morning, was to help in
killing off all the Armenians still in possession of some few
positions and edifices around the town. Seeing that the enemy's
fire was dwindling down, and unable to endure any longer the odor
of scorched flesh from the Armenian corpses scattered among the
smoking ruins of the church... Pursued by Kurdish bullets, which
felled them by the dozen, the Armenians ran hither and thither like
frightened rabbits; and not a few of them sat upon the ground,
stupefied, awaiting death like sheep bound to the sacrificial
altar, without making the slightest attempt to save themselves.
Only a small group of young men kept defending themselves
desperately, their backs to a wall, until, overcome at last by
sheer exhaustion, they fell one after another under the cutlasses
and bullets of the Kurds, who used the sword whenever possible in
order to keep from wasting cartridges.

Rafael de Nogales, Venuzualan proffesional soldier who served
as an officer in the Ottoman Army during WWI and was responsible
for the artillery portion of the Ottoman seige of Van in Four
Years Beneath the Crescent (1926) a book written about these
experiences

The Armenian population which is being expelled from
its homeland is not only being subjected to the greatest misery but
also to a total extermination (27 June 1915) — The manner
in which the Armenian are being deported for resettlement purposes
is tantamount to death a verdict for the affected people. (1 July
1915) — the time will come when Turkey will have to account for
this policy of extermination (13 August 1915).

Pamuk has made groundless claims against the Turkish
identity, the Turkish military and Turkey as a whole. He should be
punished for violating Articles 159 and 312 of the Turkish penal
code. He made a statement provoking the people to hatred and
animosity through the media, which is defined as a crime in Article
312.

The Van uprising certainly was an act of desperation.
The local Armenians realized that general massacres against the
Armenians had already started and they would be the next target. In
the course of the summer 1915 the Turkish government with
inexorable consequence brought its bloody task of extermination of
an entire nation to an end...The gruesome destruction of
the Armenian nation in Asia Minor by the Ittihadist government was
an act which was barbaric and which to the highest degree outrages
all human senses.

The criminal gangs who were released from the prisons, after a
week's training at the War Ministry's training grounds, were sent
off to the Caucasian front as the brigands of the Special
Organization, perpetrating the worst crimes against the Armenians
... The Ittihadists intended to destroy the Armenians, and
thereby to do away with the Question of the Eastern
Provinces.... In order to justify this enormous crime [of
the Armenian genocide] the requisite propaganda material was
thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as:]
the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an
uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will
succeed in opening up the straits [to enable the Allied fleets to
capture Istanbul]. These vile and malicious incitements [were such,
however, that they] could persuade only people who were not even
able to feel the pangs of their own hunger. ... among those
Armenians who were atrociously wasted, despite the fact that they
were most innocent, guiltless, and who had committed no crime
whatsoever, were the Armenians of Bursa, Ankara, Eskiehir, and
Konya.

I defended the Armenians who, even though they were completely
innocent, were murdered simply because they were Armenians. The
dictates of justice and the state's badge required such
intervention.

Ottoman Senator Ahmet Riza, from his memoirs

The partisans of Ittihad are unabashedly conceding that
their ultimate aim [Endziel] is the total annihilation (ganzliche
Ausrottung) of the Armenians of Turkey, adding, "After the war we
no longer will have any Armenians in Turkey."

They [the Ittahadist leaders] have fabricated, for the benefit
of Allied Powers, an alleged revolution stirred up by the Dashnak
party. They have inflated the importance of isolated
incidents and acts of self-defense by the Armenians and used it as
an excuse to deport the bordering population. On the way. the
Armenians have been murdered, on orders of the Committee, by gangs
of Kurds and Turks and at times, even by gendarmes.

The failure to do justice in the Armenian Genocide can
be traced in important part to the overlapping, interlocking
dynamics of economics, international law, and mass murder.
The more predatory aspects of international law dovetailed well
with the destructive social patterns of the Turkish killing. The
law proved to be incapable of prosecuting genocide without drawing
more "conventional" aspects of colonialism, national development,
and international trade into the dock as crimes as well. The legal
and economic precedents set in the wake of World War I had
considerable impact on the course of the Holocaust during World War
II, just as the more widely understood political precedents did.
Hitler himself repeatedly raised the international community's
failure to do justice in the wake of the Armenian Genocide to
explain and justify his own racial theories, and the Germans'
pattern of "learning through doing" genocide was similar in
important respects to that of the Turks. While the two crimes were
different in important respects, they both were led by
ideologically driven, authoritarian political parties that had come
to power in the midst of a deep social crisis. Both the
Ittihad and the Nazis-each originally a marginal political
party-managed to perpetrate genocide by enlisting the established
institutions of conventional life-the national courts, commercial
structures, scholarly community, and so on-in the tasks of mass
persecution and eventually mass murder. In both cases, the ruling
party achieved its genocidal aims in part by offering economic
incentives for persecution, the most basic of which were the
opportunity to share in the spoils of deported people and the
ability to transfer the costs of economic crisis onto the shoulders
of the despised group.

Christopher Simpson, in The Splendid Blond Beast
(1995)

The deprotation and destruction of the Armenians was decided by
the Young Turks Committee in Constantinople.

Colonel Stange, Commander of the 8th Regiment consisting mostly
of convicts released from Turkish prisons to join the killer bands
of the Special Organization - German Foreign Ministry
Archives.

The Armenian Genocide is proven in all its components —
among them intent. The converging evidence is well in excess of
that generally judged abundant in establishing other historical
truths. The genocide was a horrendous crime. The evidence
is there — province by province, city by city, village by village,
hamlet by hanlet, with its countless variations according to time
and place yet all the same in the vast process of extermination —
genocide. A deliberate plan, carefully organized and brutally
executed. The deniers and rationalizers offend the dignity
of the historian and of all humanity.

Yves Ternon, author of several volumes concerning human rights
and genocide in Freedom and Responsibility of the Historian —
the "Lewis Affair" (1999)

It can no longer be denied that the Turks... have
undertaken the extermination of the Armenians race and it appears
that they have largely succeeded in it. With certain air
of gleefulness Talaat recently told
me that in Erzerum, for example, there should be remaining not a
single Armenian... Turkey today is under a maniacal spell due to
the realization that she carried out the extermination of the
Armenian race with impunity.

In fact most of the available evidence points to the
conclusion that a systematic decimation of the Armenian population
in the eastern provinces had already been decided on by the Ittihad
ve Terakki regime, and that the troubles in Van and elsewhere
merely served as a convenient excuse for getting a program of mass
deportations and large-scale extermination.

By February 1916, 1.5 million Armenians were
destroyed ... the first step toward the recovery of the
economic predominance in Turkey ... there was joy in the government
circles that the long-desired opportunity finally presented
itself...

[When asked what Turkish people think about the Armenian
Genocide] — Sadly, young people in Turkey know nothing about the
subject, All they know is nationalist things written in school
textbooks. And because they lack that knowledge, they believe that
the Armenians plot bad things against their country. ... maybe
future generations will address the subject in a more reasonable
and calm manner.

Yeftan Turkyilmaz, Turkish researcher who has worked in
Armenian State archives, in an interview with Gayane Danielian -
E/RL (11 May 2005)

Until recently, in fact at the beginning of this year, the
Armenians were regarded as the most reliable element, indeed the
only reliable people within the Christian elements in Turkey. One
could read it in all the newspapers and the important Turkish
dignitaries confirmed this on every occasion, which presented
itself...Since March, an about-turn has taken place which is as
general and consequent as if the Turks had never known up until now
what dangerous people had been living within their midst.

von Tysza, German journalist in Ottoman Turkey, from German
Archives - (1915-10-01-DE-001)

The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel
intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,

Carl Wandel, (3 July 1915); as reported by Robert Fisk in
The Independent (20 May 2006)

It is evident that deportations of Armenians is not
motivated by military considerations, the minister of the
Interior Talaat Bey recently in a conversation with Dr. Mortsmann
presently in the Imperial Service, declared openly that the Porte
wants to profit from the World War for radically finishing their
internal enemies – the Christians before the intervention of
outside powers.

Baron Hans Freiherr
von Wangenheim, German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from
1912 to October 1915, in a document sent to the German Chancellery,
17 June 1915

The manner in which the matter of relocation is being
handled demonstrate that the government is in fact pursuing the
goal of annihialating the Armenian race in Turkey.

In 1982, I refuse to take part in a colloquium whose subject is
close to my heart. Organized by two Israeli professors of
psychiatry, this symposium on genocide, which I am to chair, is
scheduled for early June in Tel Aviv. Everything is set. Scholars
and historians from several continents have accepted our
invitation, among them Armenians. After all, they have ideas on
this subject which has touched them closely. How could one forget
the massacre of their parents and grandparents at the hands of the
Turkish army? At the last moment, we encounter a major hurdle.
Under pressure from Turkey, the Israelis urge me to revoke our
invitation to the Armenians. I refuse. It would be too humiliating.
And to humiliate is to blaspheme. The pressure increases. I
am given to understand that if a single Armenian participates in
the conference, Israeli-Turkish relations will suffer. And that
there would be consequences for Jews in certain Arab countries.
Jewish emissaries from Istanbul confirm this to me with documents.
No matter, I will not offend our Armenian guests. I resign as
chairman... 'A human life weighs more than all the books written
about human life.'

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks
collection

Current
revision (unreviewed)

The
Armenian Genocide

The book will look at the situation in which the Armenian
Genocide was able to take place. It will look into those involved
and where and when important events took place, to try and
establish a clear picture of the extent of what has happened.

[[File:|right|thumb|250px|Massacre By Turks in Caucasus Towns, New York Times, February 23, 1915.]]
The Armenian Genocide was the forcible deportation and massacring of Armenians during the government of the Young Turks from 1915 to 1917 in the Ottoman Empire. [1]

Contents

= Planning

=
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire went into the World War I on the side of the Central Powers. İsmail Enver, who was then the Minister of War, launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus in hopes of capturing the city of Baku. His forces were routed at the Battle of Sarikamis, and many more of his men froze to death.

Returning to Istanbul, Enver largely blamed the Armenians living in the region for actively siding with the Russians.[2] In 1914, the Ottoman Empire's War Office had already begun a propaganda drive to present Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire as a liability and threat to the country's security. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the planning:

“

In order to justify this enormous crime the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as] "the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening the straits [of the Dardanelles]."[3]

”

The Ottoman government, moving quickly, arrested an estimated 250 Armenian intellectuals on the night of 24 April 1915.[4]

The Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909 were still fresh in their minds. [5]

Foreign accounts

"I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915." Henry Morgenthau, American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1913-1916. -Henry Morgenthau

”

Influence of the Armenian Genocide on Adolf Hitler

The Armenian Genocide is said to have impacted Adolf Hitler, according to his many references to the Ottoman killings of Armenians.[6] The extent of Hitler's knowledge of the Armenian Genocide is unclear, though he did refer to their destruction several times.[7] The most known quote attributed to Hitler on the Armenians is taken from an August 1939 military meeting, prior to the invasion of Poland:

“

I have issued the command -- and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad -- that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness -- for the present only in the East -- with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?[8]

”

Gallery

References

↑ "Cultural Cleansing: Who Remembers The Armenians," in Robert Bevan. The Destruction of Memory, Reaction Books, London. 2006, pages 25-60